


A Home at the End of the World

by Xela



Series: Haven Verse [7]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Broken Dean Winchester, Broken Sam Winchester, Dean has a potty mouth, Drug Abuse, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Dysfunctional Family, Explicit Language, F/M, Family, Family Drama, Family Dynamics, Family Feels, Healing, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, Kid Fic, Kinda, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Permanent Injury, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychic Abilities, Psychological Trauma, Recovery, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, Suicidal Thoughts, Therapy, but it does get better, much better
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-11
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-03-16 14:32:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 28,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13638189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xela/pseuds/Xela
Summary: How do you rebuild the pieces of a shattered life when the world around you is in shambles?





	1. Sam

**Author's Note:**

> So I have most of this written out--just posting so I can get this out here and have some accountability to actually finish this installment. SUCK IT, DEPRESSION.
> 
> Tags will be updated as the story progresses; let me know if you have a suggestion for one or I missed warning for something!

Sam sits propped against the wall, staring at the divide. He can _feel_ them on the other side of the curtain. He’s always aware of them, even though it _hurts._ The world feels too bright and sharp around him, glass against overactive senses.

He sees too much when he looks at the world, mind scraped raw and tender, but he’ll take the pain if it means he _knows_ they’re alive. If he concentrates, extends himself, cuts his psyche on the jagged edges of the world, he can even feel them breathe. He wonders if anyone else has noticed their breathing is synchronized. That their hearts beat in time, father and daughter.

For the first time since he woke up, he’s alone with them.

It takes an inordinate amount of effort to get off the bed. His legs feel like jelly, weak and barely supportive; he downplays the progress he’s making in physical therapy and repeats what exercises he can in the dead of night, when the nightmares wake him and the only ones around to judge are his ghosts, loss and pain made manifest. He feels too small for his skin these days, trapped and claustrophobic. He’s lost so much of his awareness of the world around him, and he’s still making sense of how it comes to him now. But he pushes himself, his stubbornness serving him well, and pulls the curtains aside.

Dean’s too still. He tends to toss and turn when he’s alone in a bed, restless unless there’s someone to hold on to. He always ends up wrapped around his bed partners or tangled in the covers. He looks small and pale against the homespun linen, eyes slightly sunken, and far too thin. Even his hair looks limp and drained, dull and almost grey.

Sam stumbles forward and collapses into the closest chair. Which happens to be next to his niece.

Where Dean’s stillness is complete, Mer’s eyes move rapidly underneath her lids. She has a large bandage over her lower torso, a yellowish stain bleeding through, and a wrap keeping her left arm immobile. Sam swallows and considers looking underneath the wrapping, but he can’t bring himself to touch her.

He knows what it feels like to drive a sword between her ribs. To exalt in the give of flesh beneath his blade, taste the copper tang of fresh blood in the air, the sucking sound of damaged lungs still trying to work.

He knows that wound, and he knows what it means for her going forward.

The next thing he knows the world is swimming, darkness encroaching, then fading back into focus. He’s shivering on the floor, his muscles aching, loose in a way he associates with a particularly physically punishing training session. His breath burns in his chest, never quite satisfying. He staggers when he stands, and for a second he thinks he’s about to tumble headfirst into another panic attack, but it fades into a kind of background tension.

Sam takes a breath, and then another, and unlocks each fear-frozen muscle one by one until he can move again. He drags the chair until situated between his family and sits watch alone.

\---

Kai’s only concession to Sam’s vigil is a slightly nicer chair. Missouri spent a lot of time making sure he’d survive, it’s not Kai’s place to undo that work. But zie keeps a sharp eye on him regardless.

Sam doesn’t interact with Dean or Mer in any way. He just sits. And watches with haunted, guilty eyes as Kai and Atlahua do their work. He makes a low noise the first time they change Mer’s bandage, a wounded animal sound cut off abruptly but raises the hair on Kai’s arm. Kai gets the feeling this is part of Sam’s self-imposed penance. That Sam feels he _must_ bear witness to this.

He watches every time after that, no matter where he is or what he’s doing, or how randomly Kai sets hir schedule. Every careful shift of Kai’s body, the glint of the scissors, the gentle cleaning of the ugly wound, healing nicely but still ragged and angry, committed to memory. 

Kai starts leaving a stocked medical tray next to the bed and always finds it reorganized later.

***

Mer wakes up without any warning. The first thing she does is try to kill Sam, who was nodding off between her bed and Dean’s. 

In retrospect, they really should have seen that coming.

Mary Winchester, trained from birth to hunt that which goes bump in the night, former angelic weapon of mass destruction and unimaginable power, wakes up to the man who's actively tried to kill her for over too many years sitting beside her. She grabs a pair of scissors off the nearby tray and slices Sam open at the ear, across his jaw, and down to his chin. Only Sam's training, the reflexive jerk back and away, and Mer’s lingering weakness keeps her from slicing clean through his jugular. 

All in all, he'll have a fairly dashing scar that isn't nearly as obvious or disfiguring as it should be.

Mer actually does more damage to herself, tearing out half her stitches, reopening the wound and straining the fragile, healing muscle. She screams, half fury and half pain. They shoot her up with a massive dose of morphine before she finishes ripping out the stitches and reverses all the healing they’ve done so far; Kai eventually pushes her into a psychically induced coma, purely for Mer’s own safety.

Sam slinks back to his curtained-off space and lies on the bed staring at the ceiling, blood dripping down his neck and staining his pillow red.


	2. Dean (& Sam & Mer)

Dean wakes up in Firewall. 

It’s nothing dramatic, just like waking up from a really great, deep sleep, except it’s utterly exhausting to even make his hand flop over the edge of the bed, unusual for him not to even feel fuzzy and... He doesn't know how he knows where he is but the information is there, as certain as anything else in his life, along with a few other things. Like how he also knows Kai is with him and—

 _"Oh."_ Kai is...fascinating. Beautiful, changing. Fluid. A sliding point, changing with what he feels and sees and experiences. Colors slide into each other, swirl and settle and then flit away again. Dean's pretty sure this is unusual, that people tend to be more solid and Kai is different. Special. Dean took LSD once in high school, by accident, and saw music and heard colors and Kai reminds him of that only _brighter._ Kai glows like a swirling raindbow that’s mostly copper and slate. Also, Dean may be a little high right now, but he doesn’t know if it’s his weird alertness or Kai him...her...himher self.

"Dean?" The word is a deep green surrounded by good-humored gold, laughter spiking orange through it. Dean smiles yellow. He wants to reach out and touch but his arms are so heavy. 

He hears a low, rhythmic thudding that sends the colors dancing and reaching outwards. They’re footsteps, something whispers, two pair of them, and Dean understands Kai's “companions” now as they come to stand on either side of her; they're two people firmly fixed at the same spot on either ends of a spectrum and between them Kai stills, all the colors settling together, comfortable and content. It's like pausing an explosion right after it first ignites. A point of guaranteed calm in an ever-changing world. But even that is doing him/her/them a disservice. Trying to parse the complexities of Kai is overwhelming so his mind slips away in self-preservation.

He finds himself reaching out without conscious thought, slipping along golden pathways. He finds Mer, pulled to her like a beacon; she's in physical discomfort, but utterly determined and focused. He feels her start when she senses his intrusion, then beautiful joy that sparkles bright red-pink, quickly tempered by deep shame of sickly green-yellow and a blue bruise of sadness.

But he can’t stop, he’s pulled along on the currents, touching the minds around him, some brighter than others, and then...

...and then Sam. Dean sucks in a breath, tears pricking at his eyes because it's Sam, wholly Sam, with none of Hell’s taint choking him in darkness, and he clings to his brother, too hard because he doesn’t realize he’s being pulled in till he’s lost himself and immersed fully in

> **SAM**
> 
> had this recurring dream as a kid where he was walking towards something, but every moment that passed simply reset to his previous position. He walked but never made progress and all he could remember was the unending drive to get there. Wherever ‘there’ was. It looped in his mind, over and over, until he eventually woke with the vague sense of failure.
> 
> It is not dissimilar to waking up from an extreme psychic trauma caused by the apocalypse.
> 
> Sam breathes and a bright flash of light registers. A hundred thousand breaths later there are forms within the light, some of them moving. It hurts. The act of opening his eyes is utterly exhausting. His thoughts are a slow swirl of repetitive motion.
> 
> There’s pain and cold. He remembers shivering and the acidic taste of vomit in the back of his mouth. Emotions scraping raw against the frayed nerves of his mind, now nestled in some kind of protective cocoon. He could stay in the dark. He could stay down in the hole of his mind except he’s being pulled. He’s not _allowed_ to stay.
> 
> He chases atonement in the depths of his own mind but it always escapes them until there’s no choice but to venture up.
> 
> \---
> 
> It takes Sam almost a week to meander back to full consciousness. 
> 
> It gives Bobby and Kai time to lock down Firewall and send the worst of Sam’s opposition away with stern warnings or vague promises, depending on whom they’re talking to. Overall there aren’t a lot of people left who can identify Sam on sight, or know the full story of what went down. They’ve let the community at large think Sam was kidnapped, tortured, and controlled as a means to influence Dean, but it’s harder to lie to people who can read the truth from the breeze or see through any falsehood. There are more than a handful of people who want Sam dead. There are times when Kai thinks zie may be one of them.
> 
> Sam wakes up abruptly, terrified and confused, his mind a complete jumble. Kai weathers the chaos, and while many of the memories are still beyond Sam’s grasp, enough of them surface to paint a picture of the last couple years. His eyes dart around his small room before landing on Kai, wide and shocked.
> 
> “What...what happened?” he asks, voice thick. Lost. Kai has lost too many friends to feel anything but apathy.
> 
> “You.” Kai could have driven a knife through his heart and done less damage. Sam turns his face towards the wall, fat tears sliding down his face. Kai makes sure to keep the curtains closed; Sam’s extrasensory awareness of Dean and Mer may be out of commission, but until it kicks back in he will remain confined in this little curtained-off space. He doesn’t ask about them, seems content to curl in on himself and think about what he’s done.
> 
> Bobby forces himself to visit Sam for an hour everyday. At first he makes small talk, about the rebuilding and the transient denizens of these two small towns, but eventually he just lapses into silence, which suits Sam just fine. He gives it three more weeks until the visits stop.
> 
> Sam’s memories knit together slowly. Watching them integrate, slot into place one-by-one, is like watching a video of the past few years in fast forward. Dark circles shadow Sam’s eyes, which are red-rimmed more often that not; what little sleep he manages is always troubled and shallow. 
> 
> Atlahua does a fantastic impersonation of a professional nurse, and doesn’t seem to be holding much of a grudge. Sadly for everyone, his skills don’t naturally run towards healing. He’s a serviceable hedgewitch, though. He disappears for three days and comes back with a pack full of herbs that he carefully dries, sorts, and then brews into a tea that quiets Sam’s dreams for a time. It’s a crutch and mentally addictive, so they ration it sparingly, but it’s more grace than Sam ever expected.
> 
> “Mary told me much about her Atta Sam,” he says one day, and won’t be convinced that the Samael who tried to end the world is the same man lying on the bed. Or that he deserves whatever he gets.
> 
> One day, deep in his feelings, Sam demands that they leave him alone, let his waste away and die. Does he not deserve that? Should they not want to see him punished?
> 
> “Is this not punishment enough?” Atlahua asks gravely.
> 
> Sam laughs.
> 
> Atlahua spends a lot of time coaxing Sam to eat and forcing him out of bed, showing no censure or acknowledgement of Sam’s past actions. So far, Sam’s remained limited to the curtained-off area that serves as his ‘bedroom,’ uninterested in moving from his sickbed. Kai checks in periodically to shore up Sam’s mental defenses as needed, silent and blank. Sam never makes eye contact.
> 
> His eyes turn dull and distant as he pulls away and tries to disappear into his head but finds no respite. His nightmares have a way of crawling into everyone else’s consciousness, and soon Firewall is like a ghost town, most of the psychics fleeing and the mundanes following soon after, or taking respite in the town below, thankful the shield works both ways.
> 
> One day Sam looks at Kai and grows paler still, eyes fixed beyond hir.
> 
> “I thought—” Sam swallows and glances at Kai, who maintains zir stoic silence. “Ghosts. A-Atlahua said they’re gone?” Kai look over zir shoulder at that, but sees nothing. Senses nothing. There are no ghosts here. There are no ghosts anywhere; whatever Dean did Cleansed the world.
> 
> “They are.” Kai takes a step back at the manic, jagged rictus of a grin that twists Sam’s lips up over his teeth. He laughs, a feral sound that crawls up Kai’s spine. It rings in hir ears and ze flees, and Sam can’t stop laughing because of course he’d find ghosts where there are none.
> 
> Of course.

Dean jacknifes up, gasping, his eyes sting. Silence, then someone’s screaming, and it’s _him._ He can feel fingers in his mind, pressing down, and he thrashes, lashing out with everything. And then everything gets worse, there are people yelling around him, the wailing of warning bells and he takes one deep, satisfying breath before Mer’s there, a bright ball of demanding light and she touches him—

> **MER**
> 
> stares at the pale, still body of her father the entire time Leslie talks about _muscle damage_ and _limited range of motion_ and _intensive physical therapy._ She starts throwing around percentages, types of surgeries, and the reconstruction of infrastructure that might make all of this plausible.
> 
> The world around her feels small and garbled. There are parts of her that are gone. Some are muted, like they might come back given time, but most of them are just...absent. Like her father.
> 
> Oh he’s there, lying on the bed beside her. She can see that with her eyes. But she can’t feel him in the same way; her brain’s too fuzzy, particularly with the drugs, but the place where her Dad was—the echo of the pillar she’d ripped out of her mind what seems like an Age ago—is one of those terrifyingly absent places. A scar sensitive at the edges but completely numb otherwise. She’s always had a sense of him—even when she sent him away, there was a connection, so faint she had to look for it but it was there. It was there. 
> 
> Now there’s just silence.
> 
> She can’t Read people any more. Sometimes she can get enough random, subjective information and create a fairly cohesive picture from it. It takes a lot of effort and leaves her exhausted, a headache settling behind her eyes for hours; the first attempt gave her a migraine that raged for three days and took her twice as long to recover from. Kai had doubled down on the temporary shields in her head after that, and the world felt even more distant.
> 
> She spends most of her time asleep. She dreams formless, kaleidoscopic things that she thinks are Nephilim memories strained through her all-too-human understanding. She doesn’t quite remember what it was like being Nephilim. Sometimes she wakes up understanding how every atom of the world fits together, but it fades with awareness; there’s a film wrapped around it, a distance to the memories and actions. She remembers what drove her, the reasoning behind her actions, the slow slide into pure logic where everything became an equation and she went where the balance sheet lead.
> 
> She remembers reaching into Castiel and—
> 
> Her stomach spasms in a dry heave that hurts all the way to the pit of her stomach; it strains her arm and she sinks into the pain, clings to it because in the end there had been nothing but numbness and sometimes she can feel it creeping back in.
> 
> And then one morning she wakes up and the world is awash in color, bright and piercing and unrelenting. She’s always seen auras—they’ve always been an integral part of how she interacts with people, the colors of their soul trailing after them as they move, emotions tinting the world around them. But it’s like she got an upgrade. There are times she thinks she could almost reach out at touch them, manipulate them, which is new. From her bed she can just barely brush her fingers through the muted nimbus that surrounds her Dad, a thin opaque film on his skin. It’s reassuring to have proof that he’s in there even if he isn’t anywhere close to conscious, and more than once Kai’s found her passed out like that, reaching towards Dean.
> 
> (Kai. Oh, Kai. Hir aura shifts constantly, a riot of colors integrated more fully with the world around hir than anyone Mer’s ever seen. It’s beautiful to watch. Captivating. Mer loves it when Lauren and Mike come to visit. They’re both such distinct people, their auras almost perfectly complementary. And when they’re with Kai it’s like an aurora borealis, the vibrant hues merging joyfully together.
> 
> It’s the brightest thing in Mer’s universe right now.)
> 
> \---
> 
> Physical therapy sucks and is the single most depressing thing she has ever done. It takes almost all of her energy just to lift her arm a little bit off the bed. And then Leslie moves her arm just past the point she can manage herself and that _fucking hurts_. It makes her eye water and her teeth ache but she leans into. Pain is good, it’s progress, and it’s not even the worst part. No, the worst part is the helplessness—she couldn’t stop Leslie if she wanted to. Not even with her mind. (Telekinesis is one of those empty spaces now, though not one she greatly misses.) So she’s going to get better. Or, at the very least, be able to put on her own pants. Yay.
> 
> She’s also in psychic therapy. It seems a few months as a near-omnipotent being managed to destroy a lifetime of training. Shielding isn’t as automatic as breathing, she projects but not on command, can’t control the flashes she gets from the people around her (especially, damn him, _Sam_ ). The gentlest of Kai’s mental touch is like glass rubbed directly on her brain, and it’s just as physically draining as exercising her useless arm.
> 
> Leslie tries to pull doctor-rank and stop her lessons after the first time Mer develops a visible muscle knot in her neck. She has a tendency to tense when she’s concentrating, the strain of controlling her mental powers transferred to her body. Purely psychosomatic, but Mer had flatly refused and Kai had backed her up. Faced with both of them Leslie didn’t stand much of a chance. But it does seem like Kai eases off a bit, which makes Mer all the more determined to push harder.
> 
> “Your ruthlessness is counterproductive,” Kai says, forcing Mer’s fingers to relax and uncurl. Mer grunts and reaches out. It’s so clumsy. Particularly in comparison to what she had been capable of Before. “Do not try so hard.”
> 
> “Okay. I’ll try harder.” Kai sighs and presses down against a particularly vicious knot in her neck. Mer bites off a sound of pain and breathes out through her nose. Pain is progress and progress is pain. Kai lets the sting of her displeasure gently buffet against Mer’s shields.
> 
> “We must needs get you out of this space,” Kai decides. The atmosphere in the recovery room is tense, to say the least, and not overly conducive to healing. Leslie agrees, says Mary needs sunlight and open air, not the oppressiveness of Sam’s guilt and Dean’s continued convalescence. 
> 
> They should have sequestered them in their own building, away from Sam, but apparently space had been at a premium in the days After, and by the time it occurred to them, too many of Dean’s healing spells had been fixed to this place, and nowhere else was secure enough to move Sam. Mer, refuses to leave Dean alone with _him,_ and seems perfectly capable of projecting arctic iciness Sam’s direction. She growls and snaps at Sam, teeth bared; Sam slinks around, tail between his legs and belly exposed to her vicious teeth. 
> 
> Mer turns on Kai next, the closet thing to an authority figure in her life, vicious and mean until Kai storms off in a huff.
> 
> Atlahua comes in the next day and tells Mer she’s leaving the cottage. He neither waits for nor requires a response. He simply picks her up and settles her in one of Bobby’s rocking chairs outside, the door to the hospital open, chair angled so she can see. Mer stews for a few minutes but can’t help the way she keeps turning into the sun. It’s a truly beautiful day.
> 
> Leslie “happens” by an hour later, and mentions that they can do physical therapy outside. It’s a relaxed session, just making sure the muscles stay supple. Atlahua joins in on the pretense of learning, and magically Mike and Lauren have a few hours to spare as well, so everyone does a round of PT.
> 
> Seeing her three friends struggle through some of the exercises energizes Mer. None of them lack competitiveness, and soon the entire session resembles some sort of terrifying boot camp with Mer yelling out arbitrary scores and all of them laughing.
> 
> It becomes part of their routine. Psyc therapy in the morning, lunch, physical therapy, back to bed. Contact with the other denizens of Firewall does more for Mer’s abilities than anything else. Throwing themselves bodily in the deep end and figuring out how to swim is a Winchester Special.
> 
> Mer slowly loses her wane pallor and develops a healthier coloring; she’s still far too thin and finds eating difficult, but there’s progress. She smiles from time to time, but there are shadows lurking, ever-present.

He comes to in flashes, snippets of sound and light slipping through and it feels like the worst of his father’s boot camps times ten. He can’t catch his breath.

“—he can’t de—”

“-ean? Dean? No, he’s slipp—”

“—three.”

“Yes, he’s stable, keep that up.”

"—stay away! Dean! You must open your eyes!" He hadn't even realized they were closed. 

The vision is swept away by bright sunlight and at least he knows where the pain is coming from now. Kai looks...like Kai, but with something indefinable shifting beneath the surface. He thinks it should probably look weird but instead it just looks natural. 

Kai touches Dean's forehead, smooths the furrow there. Dean breathes a sigh of relief as a block snaps into place and darkness claims him once again.

Waking up was a terrible idea.


	3. Dean, Sam (& Kai)

"You're a dude," Dean observes inanely, voice hoarse and strained. This new awareness is...weird. Manageably weird, but. Still.

Kai jerks up from his lite doze and blinks. Dean would kill for some water. Kai reaches for what looks like a small turkey baster. Dean drinks from it like he’s an oversized baby bird. Or a gerbil. He’d get angry, but the water tastes amazing and is soothing the gnawing ache in his belly.

"I am for the moment. Your entire family skews me towards the masculine. It is aberrant—not many people have true influence, and rarely so specific. Stop reaching. You shattered all of your shields, including that ungainly barricade you wrapped around your core. You must rediscover your abilities now." Dean blinks, trying to convey his confusion because he can't talk at the moment; his tongue feels numb and his eyes are harder to open with each blink. "You were always more powerful than you thought, Dean. Than you ever let yourself be." Dean scowls, eyes sliding closed.

Part of him had hoped this would all go away. He fried enough of his brain stepping through that archway, why wouldn’t this be the first thing to go? For a moment he remembers—vastness, being the Earth, knowing and touching every living creature—before it’s swept away by Kai’s touch and he’s —

> **Kai**
> 
> A very twisted, unhealthy and shameful part of Kai is pleased with Sam’s suffering, wants him punished for the innumerable number of people that died at his whim. It's hard to remember he was, for all intents and purposes, possessed when he tried to end the world. 
> 
> Kai calls Bobby, who loves the Winchesters like a father, to deal with him. But even fathers can be scared of their children, and Sam’s eyes dart wildly about the room, landing on unseen figures, murmuring apologies for unheard recriminations before he escapes inward. Bobby lets him hide with guilty relief and sets about getting stupendously drunk.
> 
> Kai leaves Atlahua in charge and joins Bobby at his cabin.
> 
> They’re three drinks in (Bobby’s closer to six, but he’s more experienced, so it evens out) when Kai offers, “We could kick him out.” Bobby pauses, Mason jar pressed to his lips, moonshine burning his nose and throat, and for one terrible fucking minute considers it.
> 
> By “kick him out” Kai means sentencing Sam to certain insanity and most likely death—the latter being the kinder outcome. Sam has no control over his abilities, and beyond the safety of Firewall’s boarders no real defenses. Kai’s temporary shields will shatter under the onslaught and Sam would turn into a gibbering mess. 
> 
> Bobby swallows, flushing from more than the strong drink, and refills his cup.
> 
> “He seen ‘em yet?”
> 
> “No.” Mer and Dean lie mere feet away, their minds beyond Kai’s reach. Alive but not living. She’s certain Sam knows they’re there, but he hasn’t tried to see them.
> 
> Bobby grimly drains his glass. He feels a sick sense of shame for even contemplating Kai’s offer, the feeling crawling over Kai’s skin. There’s been enough death in the world. And Sam…Sam would never do the things Samael did. Humanity’s got a lot of rebuilding to do; they shouldn’t start with blood on their hands.
> 
> Kai knows what Bobby will say before he does.
> 
> “Should at least have the decency to stick ‘round and apologize,” he grumbles, words slurring at the edges. “Owes ‘em that much, even if he’ll run in the end. He’s the one that runs. Dean’s the one that stands in the road, darin’ you to keep goin’. Mary…” Kai stays until Bobby drinks himself into oblivion, taking the bottle before he gets alcohol poisoning and gently encouraging him to sleep.
> 
> She’s feeling conflicted and unsettled as she makes her way back to the hospital. This kind of prolonged, deep-seated anger is unfamiliar, ineffectual, and unwelcome. But she doesn’t know how to reconcile her volatile feelings towards Sam. Or even if she wants to.
> 
> She blames her distraction for being so easily caught. Mike steps out of the shadows, directly into her path; Lauren comes up from behind, the two of them moving in perfect harmony. Hir beautiful mirrors, shining with love. Lauren skims her lips lightly over Kai’s neck and up to hir ear; Mike sneaks his hand underneath hir shirt, the sensitive pads of his fingers leaving goose bumps on hir skin. Their presence quiets the maelstrom within and ze leans back into Lauren, lets someone else take hir weight. Mike smiles and kisses the palm of hir hand.
> 
> “I have been neglecting you,” Kai sighs, turning to nuzzle into Lauren. Ze’d forgotten the simple joy in balance. Of being comfortably held between these two amazing people.
> 
> “Yes.” Lauren nips at hir jaw.
> 
> “You’re coming with us. No objections,” Mike says.
> 
> “Wouldn’t dream of it,” Kai murmurs, and follows hir loves towards their cabin. The Winchesters can look after themselves for the night. 

Dean comes back to himself with a vicious sense of vertigo and is very thankful at the bedpan Kai holds up for him to vomit what little water he’s managed to ingest.

“What. Fuck,” he grunts out, curling into a ball on the bed.

"Remedial psychic lessons for all the Winchesters." Dean groans, Mer’s experiences in psychic therapy coming back full force. He should have just stayed asleep. It feels like someone's shoving ice picks in his eyes. A brief pinch and the rush of medicine alleviates some of his pain but this headache isn’t normal. 

"I think Firewall will not be big enough for all of you,” Kai says. Hir words flair bright red in warning, but it strikes Dean in that moment with staggering force that they’re all alive. Mer and Sam and him—they survived the Apocalypse. He’d been prepared to die; had been prepared to take Sam with him, or follow him down to hell. He _had_ died. He remembered. Being eaten by hate and oozing darkness, the flash of pain when the bullet sliced through his skill. Dozens of memories flash in front of him clear as the day they happened, puzzle pieces he understands all at once.

Sam is in tatters, unmoored and battered by waves of guilt, exhausted down to the smallest part of himself, worrying at invisible wounds. Dean can see the figurative marks of self-flagellation peeling away his skin, new gashes opened as Sam gets trapped in his thoughts. 

Mer boils with anger, shaking with pain, a raw and open wound. Dean’s shoulder aches in sympathy. He wants to fix it, heal them all, but he just gets sucked in further and finds himself floundering, it’s like reliving everything that’s happened without any of the time in between, the emotion piling in on him until—

The light in the room is different. Softer. Late evening meandering towards night.

“Dean?” A woman shines a very bright light in his eyes, making him wince. She’s...familiar, somehow. “Dean? Are you back with us?” He blinks deliberately because even his face muscles hurt. “Good. You had a couple of seizures. We’ve fixed your room so that it does...psychic things. I really don’t understand what they did, but it is helping. You’re going to feel sore for a little while, but between Kai, Missouri, and some anti-seizure meds, you should be OK. Alright?”

Dean blinks again, and tries not to panic—he’s far too exhausted for that.

“Good. I’m going to start an IV line, and then we’ll let you rest.” She disappears and Dean’s left staring at the exposed beams of a cabin, esoteric writing and symbols carved fresh into the wood. He drifts, eyes snapping open when he feels the uncomfortable pinch of a needle in his hand. There’s a dark-skinned, shaggy young man leaning over him with a wide smile.

 _Atlahua? Here?_ So grown up. Dean must make some kind of face because Atlahua laughs, pats him on the cheek, and disappears from view. 

The next person he sees is Missouri, who looks at him with pursed lips. Her eyes are milk white, but her “Mmmmhm.” is still the most skeptical, unimpressed sound he’s ever heard.

“We will talk later, Dean Winchester,” she says, which isn’t terrifying at all. But her pale eyes soften when she kisses him on the forehead. “And we’ll save Bobby for later, too. You’re welcome.” Dean grunts.

“Alright, everyone out but Kai,” the doctor says and he realizes it’s _Leslie._ Holy shit, Leslie went and found her some serious authority. She wears it well. “And don’t you do anything else to him. Check the blocks and let him sleep, okay?” Dean’s eyes are already sliding closed, too difficult to keep open, when Kai and his beautiful swirl of ever-changing colors floats into his field of vision.

Kai’s hands are warm and soft over his face. 

Just as he’s about to drop, he knows with unfailing certainty that Sam is about to do something stupid. He tries to rouse, to warn them, but between Kai’s mental coaxing and the medication Leslie’s putting through his IV, he’s lost to unconsciousness.

***

Sam walks. 

He’s got a backpack full of nonperishables, a couple water bottles, and an army of silent specters following him down the road. More and more of them every day, and he knows that’s a bad sign.

He’d spent every moment since Dean woke up trying to jerry-rig something that would let him leave. He’d packed everything away until even the ghosts had retreated to presences in his peripheral vision. They’ve been creeping their way in, more and more of them.

About four days after he leaves Firewall his shields fully collapse. He’d clung to them with desperation, longer than he should have, but as his knees crash against unforgiving asphalt, he wonders if he can finally be at peace.

No. He knows he doesn’t die here. But this is part of his penance.

Someone must have found him because he comes to in an abandoned cabin. They’ve left him there with extra supplies and a good luck charm, proving there’s still good left in a post-apocalyptic world at the very least. 

He’s desperately thirsty. There are six water bottles and a dozen cans of food on the table by his cot; he drinks all the water and works through most of the food, eating without checking the labels.

He eventually stumbles into the cabin’s small bathroom and sees himself in the mirror. He’s lost a good deal of weight, all the muscle definition he’d managed to regain, grown a very bushy beard, and is in desperate need of a bath. But he’s standing on his own two feet, and he’s not any crazier than when he started...he thinks.

His vision swims and he feel light-headed if he moves too quickly, everything feels tender, but he’s alone in it. Shed the last thing binding him to his old life. All in, it takes about three weeks for him to get back on the road. 

He keeps the beard.


	4. Dean

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apparently I'm updating on Sundays...

Dean wakes up and there’s a hole in his world. This is getting repetitive as fuck, he’d like to formally lodge a complaint with the world, the universe, and everything in between. He’s also tired of being tired and sleeping so goddamned much. What’s the point of saving this fucking, ungrateful world if he doesn’t even get to live in it, Jesus goddamned fucking Christ on a shitty-ass cracker. If he could light shit on fire with him mid, he’d just burn this whole place to the ground around him.

“Sam’s gone.” His voice drags along a dry throat. “How long?”

“Three days,” Kai answers. “We presume he remains extant.” 

Dean sighs. Sam’s still alive, he know that much. He can’t go after him yet, though. (There’s no question that he will, because that’s what they always do. Sam’s probably the only one who doubts it right now, but that’s half Sam’s natural inclination towards self-sabotage and half the trauma they’re all trying to repress.)

“Mer,” Dean breathes. She’s here, but distant, and a pulse of red-and-black pain. “What…”

“Mary attempted a sortie beyond the walls shortly after Sam,” Kai says, anger barely contained. “It went poorly.”

“Her mind—“

“Intact. Contused. Obdurate.” Kai’s vocabulary grows more esoteric with agitation. “But that is not your vexation. Sleep, and eat, and sleep again. Fix your kin when their wounds are no longer fresh and yours have mended.” 

That’s good advice, but easier said than done. Because Mer’s going to leave too and Dean will once again be torn between them and he’s tired of that too. 

***

A month goes by without a word passing between them. Dean sees Mer once in the morning when she climbs out of bed and once in the evening when she climbs back in.

There’s a deep boiling well of anger filling the gulf between them.

***

Mary comes to see him before she leaves.

Dean’s graduated to sitting up for most of the day, and feeding himself with a large spoon he only drops every third or fourth time, and only sleeping 18 hours a day.

There’s a fight they need to have, things they need to say, accusations hurled and met. But looking at his daughter, gaunt and dead-eyed, empty of her usual vibrancy, Dean wishes there wasn’t this simmering rage between them. He just wants to hug her, like he did when she was small, wrap her in his jacket and hide her from the world.

“I’m 20,” Mer says and what? When…when did that happen? And why hadn’t anyone reminded him? “As of two weeks ago. I didn’t even realize.”

“Huh. They said your teenage years would be Hell,” Dean rasps. Mer gives the floor a wan, twisted smile.

“Yeah, well. What did they say about my 20s?”

“It gets better?” Dean says, dry and sarcastic. Mer smirks.

“That’ll be nice. When does that kick in, because right now I’m always too fucking _furious_ to feel _better.”_ Somehow Dean ended up with the bravest kid, tackling her problems head on instead of dancing around them until they become the Harbinger of the Apocalypse. 

Dean wants to tell her that he knows. He really does—he’s not only been there himself, but he actually _remembers_ how she feels thanks to his newly rewired brain. He can’t say that, though. It won’t help her. He can’t help her—not yet, because he’s always mad too. Even when he’s too tired to feel anything else.

So he looks at his daughter and says, “Go.” Mer’s lips turn into a flat line and the rest of her face falls into blankness.

“That’s it? Go? Get out of your hair, see you whenever?”

“That’s not what I meant. I’m giving you permission to go find yourself, or whatever new age hippie-dippie thing we’re calling it these days.”

Mer scrubs a hand over her face, though her hair, before looking Dean square in the eyes.

“I don’t need your permission.”

“That’s not—“ Dean runs his fingers through his own hair and sighs. “I’m just saying—we have time. For once, you can…run away from your anger. Or towards it. You’re not happy here, I can feel that, and your,” Dean bites the bullet and gives into what he knows, deep in his bones, “your path isn’t in Firewall. There’s something waiting for you out there and yes, I know how this sounds, and no, I can’t be more specific than that so just go. And find us when you’re ready. You don’t have to worry about me anymore.” 

Silence stretches between them, Mer’s face blank, her gaze penetrating.

“What a massive load of bullshit.” Dean barks a laugh, loud and harsh in the silence of the cabin.

“Yeah,” Dean agrees, sagging against the bed. That doesn’t mean it’s not true. 

“I’m not leaving to find myself. I’m leaving because I don’t want to be around you. Or around when you leave me to go after Sam. When you choose him over me. Again.” 

“I _never_ —“

“Fuck you.” It’s said with so much cold fury it hits Dean like a physical slap. “I knew about your Dream Walks. The secret rendezvous with Samael you refused to give up, even when he was burning the world down around us. When he was trying to kill me. Most of us knew, by the end. But I _always_ did.”

“Don’t talk about things you don’t understand,” Dean says, adrenaline surging through him, preparing him to fight.

“He tried to kill me. He tried to kill you. When he wasn’t trying to enslave you. Or have you forgotten about the soul bond he tried to trick you into?”

“And how is that any different that what you did?” It’s Mer’s turn to jerk back as if slapped.

“What?”

“You took my memories, programmed me to do what you wanted, then dropped me off in the middle of some hick town so I was out of the way and never looked back.”

“I saved your life.”

“You didn’t save my life—you rewrote it. You took everything I was, everything that made me _me,_ and replaced it with _someone else_. So be careful when you start talking about other people’s sins, Mary. You’re an adult now. World’s less forgiving.”

Mer paces around the cabin and Dean is jealous of how easy she makes it look. Three laps and not even winded, which is more than Dean can say when her hard, implacable gaze settles on him. She came of age during what should have been the End Times and Dean should really remember that.

“You asked me to shoot you in the head.” 

“Mary—”

“You, my father. Asked me, your child. To _shoot you in the head._ Anna, an Angel of the Lord On High halle-fucking-lujah, told me to shoot you in the head, that stupid fucking book told me to shoot you in the head, everyone just expected me to shoot _my father dead_ like it was no big deal. Like killing you was something I should just be fine with. You asked me to kill you, Dad. To save the world, sure, but you couldn’t even do that when it was Sam so how the hell was I supposed to just casually put a bullet through your brain? How was I supposed to live with that? So no. There’s always another way, you taught me that. I found a goddamned loophole. I did exactly what everyone one asked of me and I refuse to apologize for it!”

“And did your loophole require you to steal my memories? Dress me up like a hick and pawn me off to the nearest Creepertown?” Mer shuts down, looks away, lips pressed into a thin line, and Dean realizes that he’s stumbled onto something he hadn’t really thought was true. He’s almost too numb to feel betrayed. “You didn’t have to.”

“Yes I did.”

“Really? Well I’m going to have to call bullshit on that one, baby girl. I taught you everything you know.”

When Sam and John used to fight and Sam was prepared for the long haul, he’d do this thing where he settled into his body, feet braced, arms loose but ready—to deflect a blow, throw a punch, or react in whatever way was necessary. He sees Mer do the same thing now, her chin coming up, proudly as she gathers he conviction around her like a shield. 

“I couldn’t kill you, but I couldn’t trust you, either. ”

The silence stretches loud and damning between them. 

It’s not even a recrimination, the way she says it. Dean’s glad he’s bed bound because his chest feels tight and he can’t get enough air. Deep breaths just make him feel lightheaded and he can’t...this can’t...

“I couldn’t trust you not to go with him. And I couldn’t fight you both.”

“I wouldn’t have—”

“You would.” She’s so certain that for a moment Dean feels it too. “You reeked of him. Every night, I could see him on you, around you. He looked like a bruise, did you know that? I thought you didn’t know, at first. That he was...sneaking in, or something.”

“He wasn’t,” Dean admits, voice a hoarse whisper.

“No. He wasn’t. You _let him in._ We knew—we gave you so many chances to tell us, I asked you to take steps, get warded, to block him out and you wouldn’t. Maybe by then you couldn’t.”

“You don’t understand. I couldn’t give up on him. Just like I wouldn’t give up on _you_ if—”

“Except you would have. You did. If you went over to him, if that rot took hold, you would have done worse than give up on me. I saw it after you let him _mark you_.” Mer’s anger feels like stepping on Legos in bare feet, but everywhere. “You let him in, let Hell get a hook into you—”

“It wasn’t—”

“I watched it spread. A little more every day, a little more each night. You wouldn’t talk to me. You wouldn’t listen. A junkie who needed his next fix. I was going to lose you to one or the other, and I’d already lost two of my parents.”

“So you killed me anyways.” 

“No! That’s the point!”

“Mary. That person, the one who never left his sad little town, didn’t look beyond the boarders of what was familiar, who had no family or ambition? That _wasn’t me._ You did exactly what the prophecy said, Mer-Bear. You killed me.” She recoils from him at the pet name and he feels vindicated. Like he’s won a fight. Against his child.

“Well. You’re doing great for a dead man, Dad. Glad to have you back.”

She turns to walk away from him.

“Just tell me one thing. No bullshit. No pretense. Knowing I love you even when I’m so mad it makes it hard for me to breathe.” 

Mer half-turns back towards him saying, “What?” 

“Who’d you sacrifice?” Mer turns to face him fully at that, eyes searching his face for some kind of clue. She won’t find anything. They stare at each other, two combatants resting in their corners, waiting for the next swing. Dean pushes, “These kinds of spells always require a sacrifice. A life for a life. Who’d you kill, Mary?” 

Her blank expression twists into something sharp and lethal.

“Never got a name.” 

When she turns to go this time, Dean lets her.

***

Mary Winchester leaves Firewall two weeks later.

Dean stares out at the green forest and tries not to hate it here. He’s made for flashy cars and run down diners, not tiny settlements in the middle of nowhere. Especially not after getting trapped in the hillbilly version of Pleasantville.

“Your family would take the gold, silver and bronze if brooding were an Olympic sport.” 

Dean’s never been more thankful for Bobby and his impeccably timed alcohol. That he withholds from Dean, handing him some iced tea instead, the monster. 

“Yeah, but who gets what?” Dean asks, scowling at the drink in his hand.

“Boy, that ain’t even a question. Y’all got years of practice on Mer and no one can brood like Sam. Not with that face.” The slight tremor over Sam’s name is barely there, but Dean had been looking. He lets the corner of his mouth twist up, an indistinct expression that doesn’t give much away. His silence and almost meditative calm disturbs Bobby, who’s busier scraping the label off his beer than drinking it.

“You know you can’t leave yet.”

“Yep.”

“Seriously. You’ll die. Sam’s probably already gone, and Mer’s likely half way there already, but even those idjits had weeks and weeks of healin’ on ya. “

“They’re both fine.” Sam’s vaguely up and over, and other than a couple of times when Dean’s woken up terrified because of Sam’s nightmares, he’s doing okay. Mer is...fine. He knows she’s alive, but that’s about all he gets from her. (Deep in that part of himself he doesn’t care to acknowledge, he honestly isn’t sure whether that’s because that’s all he wants to know, if she’s blocked him somehow, or if his ability is that limited.)

Bobby grunts and settles back into his chair, takes a long draw from his beer.

“Hey,” Dean says, not taking his eyes off the gently waving trees, “make sure you bring me one of those next time.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is one of three key conversations in this story that has held it up for so long. I've thought about it and rewritten it over and over to try and get the subtleties and words right now now *poof* It's out there. I'm going to collapse in an anxious bundle in the corner.
> 
> (Also, just reminding everyone that I'm evil but DID promise to Make Things Better...eventually...and this is the last story in this verse.)


	5. Mer, Sam

Mer shoulders her pack, a collection of cast off clothes donated by the denizens of Firewall, and so many cans of food she rattles. She'll pick up a motorcycle and some guns in the town that's sprung up at the base of the mountain, the life support for Firewall. (Some computer nerd had named it “Berferd”.) But first there’s a half hour hike she’s elected to make by herself, against all advice. 

It’s a nice walk that lets her take a few minutes to center herself and reinforce her shields before she ventures into the town and its press of minds. Everything’s a little too bright and a little too loud, but she’s dealing. Really.

Berferd bustles with activity and purpose. Mer pauses a moment to take it all in, so different from the stillness in Firewall which is more a sanctuary than anything else. But this place...these are people building lives, building community. Working together. Not at all overwhelming, and not the source of the headache Mer can feel creeping over her eye.

A flash of a familiar blonde catches her eye and she starts.

"Ruby?"

The demon's hauling wood construction slats, thick work gloves over her hands. Her hair’s long and shaggy, dirt smudged on her face. She’s been sweating, and Mer can see dull red scratches from the wood over her arms.

"Mary Winchester," she says, looking her up and down with a smirk. "As I live and breathe. I heard you were up and about." 

"You...how..." All the demons and all the angels had been banished, chased from the Earth's surface with the doors slammed shut behind her. She has no doubt they'll be back at some point, along with the ghosts and other such things. But this soon?

The slats hit the ground with a clunk and Ruby drapes herself over them, studying Mer from beneath her unkempt bangs.

"Not a demon anymore." Ruby pulls a water bottle out of her pocket and takes a deep drink, liquid spilling out of her mouth and down her chin. Mer peers at her aura, surprised. She really is human, for the most part. There are traces of her past, bruises on her soul that are sickly green and dark purple-black. But it’s all woven into the whole of her, a part of her as necessary as all the others, and she’s…Mer’s not sure, but the pale patches spreading through the colors, like scarring around an open wound, might be indicative of healing. She looks up and finds Ruby watching her knowingly. "Burned the demon right out of me. I'm certified human these days. Well. Mostly human. I've still got a couple of advantages." Judging by the way she handles the slats, at the very least better-than-average strength.

"How's that going for you?" Mer asks.

"It sucks Satan’s balls," Ruby says, a brilliant grin lighting up her face, quickly morphing into sly mischief. "But the sex is awesome!" Mer laughs at that.

"That's good. I guess.”

“Silver linings,” Ruby says sagely.

“I, uh. Wanted to say thanks. For..." She trails off and Ruby waves her hand dismissively.

“Shit under the bridge.”

“That’s not the...um. Right.” Mer shifts awkwardly, unsure of what to say next. "So I'm going. Somewhere. Getting away to clear my head or whatever. But, uh, maybe I'll see you around?"

"Fuck, I hope not," Ruby says, and that surprises another laugh out of Mer. “No offense, but if I never see another Winchester after today, I’ll die a happy ex-demon.”

"Fair enough." After all that's happened, Mer's not even sure she wants to have anything to do with her own family. Can't begrudge someone for having the same good sense.

"Hey, but do me a solid? Don't start another Apocalypse." Ruby doesn't try and disguise it as a joke.

"Not really a problem," Mer says with a laugh, “but quite honestly I'd rather die.”

“Yeah, self sacrifice has never been the issue.” Good ole Ruby, never pulling her punches. Mer gives Ruby one last, searching look and then, at a loss for anything left to say, turns to go, waving a careless goodbye over her shoulder.

“Hey, Baby Winchester!” A piece of paper hits Mer in the cheek just as she’s turning back around, leaving a thin, stinging cut on her skin. She glares but opens it, reading the address scrawled inside. Some where in Georgia. “If you’re looking for a place to start.” Ruby flips her off and walks away without looking back.

***

There’s a part of Sam that still has faith. Or maybe he’s just daring it to fail him. Whichever way you spin it, he doesn’t make any plans. Just walks and lets the universe provide.

He’s never wanting for long. He finds a cache of food, or friendly travellers willing to spare a bottle of water, or a waypoint stocked by some Good Samaritan. Sam tries to hunt once, has a deer in his sights...and can’t pull the trigger. Can’t bring himself to take another life. When he thinks about it, he hasn’t eaten meat since the broth they gave him when he first woke up. With infrastructure still struggling to come back, animals are generally too valuable to slaughter. 

He helps a town in Missouri raise a barn and till their first fields. It’s backbreaking work from sunrise to sunset, but Sam’s too exhausted to dream at the end of the day so he counts it a win. He feels a measure of peace there, until he reminds himself that he doesn’t deserve peace, so he bids them farewell and keeps on walking. 

Most people deserted the cities when Pestilence swept through the first time. Croatoan merely sealed the demise of centralized ‘civilization,’ and people started gathering together in smaller, more defensible and mobile communities. Since the Cleansing, people have started travelling again, reconnecting parts of the world with one another, so wanderers like Sam aren’t treated with out right suspicion all the time—most of them are welcomed by people eager for news from even the next town over.

Sam helps where he can, pays his way by offering his general handyman skills in exchange for food and shelter. He’s sure there are awful people capitalizing on the disarray—humanity has always been capable of great evil on its own —but he doesn’t find them. Just honest people trying to survive and rebuild. (He keeps his supernatural knowledge to himself, only giving in to correct or strengthen wards when no one’s around to see what he does, or leaving anonymous gifts for residents to find after he’s several miles away.)

Eventually he ends up in what’s left of Chicago, a landscape of collapsed and gutted buildings, the skeletal remains of shining skyscrapers, and a seriously creepy atmosphere, nature doing as it does and taking over without humanity to beat it back. He picks his way through rough terrain, scaling crumbled walls and piles of broken furniture—some of the many hallmarks of Croatoan, luckily Cleansed along with the rest of the world. This place should make him feel hunted and paranoid, but something about here feels _right_ in a way that’s hard to quantify.

He glimpses evidence of habitation here and there, but it isn’t till he stumbles upon a well-tended garden set up in an empty lot that it sinks in: there are _survivors_ here. People eking out an existence where they can; most likely where they _know_ because Chicago isn’t the most hospitable place in the winter, people left for good reasons, which begs the question...who would find the city safer than the countryside?

He hears the soft scrape of a shoe on concrete. Pauses under the guise of adjusting his pack and marks at least four different people lurking in the shadows; more than a few tracking him from above, tracking him from building to building. He keeps walking, surreptitiously loosening his gun in its holster. 

He hears someone drop down behind him and breaks into a sprint, flying around a corner—

—and straight into a two-by-four stretched across the narrow alley.

Blood floods his mouth, his nose breaks and for a panicky moment he’s convinced he’s drowning. Fuck. He stares sightlessly up at the over-exposed sky.

The slender barrel of a rifle interrupts his view, presses against his forehead, and Sam gives a hoarse laugh. 

The blow to his head leaves him woozy. He can feel his shields crumbling, sees a sea of ghosts pressing in around him, reaching out, so he closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and sends himself into unconsciousness. 

***

Sam wakes up with a killed headache and all his stuff has been looted. Including his shoes. Luckily, he finds them a little further down the alley—he’d wager a guess that none of his attackers even came close to his size. Even the pain of resetting his broken nose and the dim prospect of starting from nothing in this war zone doesn’t change the feeling that he’s supposed to be here. So he sets up base camp on the third floor of a moderate high-rise—the kind of apartment that used to make Dean uncomfortable for the sheer amount of _wealth_ it implied—and explores.

It takes him a few weeks to figure out this Brave New World. The gangs have carved most of the city up between themselves, bringing a brutal authoritarianism to the lawless land. Other groups of survivors flit through the shadows carving out an existence amongst the ruins of their former society. He understands the desire to hold firm to something familiar, but Chicago has become a vicious, violent place, and his training is the only reason he’s still alive several times over. 

He’s walking near what was once University Village—he’s made it a point to visit all the various churches, temples, and the like around Chicago because it gives him goals to accomplish—when he hears the sounds of fighting, frantic and desperate. 

He finds five gang members trying to abscond with a teenager, two younger children trying to help fend them off. It’s the kid lying on the ground, blood turning tawny hair red, that has Sam moving before he’s fully aware of what he’s doing. 

He takes out the first gang member with a sharp blow to the back of the head, notes his collapse with clinical detachment before pulling his shotgun out of the holster on his back (bless those wealthy 2nd Amendment assholes from Before), swinging the stock like a baseball bat straight into the other guy’s face, shattering his nose and probably his skull. The third thug slashes at him with a long, ill-kept knife, circling and thrusting in a way that tells Sam she’s untrained; he waits until she lunges forward, strikes her in the throat with the butt, pulls it back and uses the momentum to flip the gun around and aim at the last two gang members in one fluid movement. Thug three falls to the ground, clutching her throat and gasping.

The three gangbangers groaning on the ground are in various stages of ‘alive,’ but all of Sam’s attention is on the dead kid. He can’t see much, there’s too much blood, but he can’t help imagining Mer lying there. He’d envisioned it enough times when he was the worst version of himself that it’s far too easy. He takes a breath and gently closes the kid’s eyes. 

“Gonna gitchu,” one of the thugs growls, glaring and too cocky for someone at the end of Sam’s shotgun. For a moment the urge to kill rises up fiercely in Sam, chokes him with rage and the sense-memory of flesh giving beneath his fists. Sam shoves it down with gritted teeth, breathing harshly through his nose.

“Sure,” Sam agrees easily, straightening to his full height, letting his rage roll off him. “You make sure Goez knows about it first, yeah?” A few gang members had targeted him early into his stay in Chicago; things had escalated until Sam found himself meeting with enough representatives with the various gangs to work out a truce. Sam’s now got an Understanding with the gangs and several blocks of neutral land that’s technically under his control.

He sees them register who he is and just how dead they’ll be if he gets in touch with their bosses. He holsters his gun and walks away, heading numbly for his camp, seeing Mer’s bloody, broken body in his mind’s eye.

It speaks a lot of his state of mind that he doesn’t realize he’s being shadowed for almost a mile. They’re not even being subtle about it, the three surviving kids arrayed behind him, hollowed eyed and empty except for the tallest, the one who’d been slung over the lead thug’s shoulder, making a decent attempt at dick-punching the guy in spite of being just a shade too short to really reach.

He can’t really place her age; years of malnutrition and running for her life have likely left her smaller than she should be. There’s a wealth of experience in her bearing as well. She stares back at him, challengingly, and Sam’s at a loss.

“I’m not your savior,” he tells her. Her lips thin and her chin raises, just a bit.

“The gangs’re all scared of you. None else’d stop to help. Better ‘n nothin’,” she says.

The littlest kid snuggles closer into her leg, blue eyes wide and glued to Sam. He’s not sure, because he’s only recently started trying to stretch his mental powers beyond himself, and things are so fundamentally different he can’t always parse what they’re telling him, but he thinks the kid’s mind brushes against his in quite greeting.

A sound echoes against stone and concrete, and there are more kids creeping out of the shadows, edging closer to his little pool of light. The oldest can’t be older than 15. None of them look like they’ve ever known a full meal or a night’s sleep.

They all look at him, but not with expectation or excitement. They’re all too tired and broken for any of that. They’re just…waiting. For him. He imagines saying no, watching them turn away and quietly disappear. 

“Come on.”

This is going to be a disaster.

\---

Kids start showing up at his doorstep. He stops to do a headcount before going to forage for food and realizes he’s got 23 people living in his little camp. They’re surprisingly good at governing themselves; they all take their lead from Marci—fka dick-punch girl. 

And they’re growing. 

It’s like someone sent up a signal flare because there seems to be a pretty steady stream of kids showing up and settling in. 

Only twice have prospective residents showed up that set Sam’s teeth on edge and made his hackles rise—the Cleansing hadn’t done anything to cure humanity of its baser qualities. He’d stopped them from stepping over the threshold, and Marci had merely closed the door in their faces and gone about her day.

Adults who have tried to join their group have largely…not. Almost none made it past their threshold, and of those, nearly every one left after a few days of two dozen silent children creepily watching every move they made. He’s joined in adulthood by one quiet woman whose entire demeanor screams loss of a child, and an 18-year-old former gang member who stopped right on the edge of his property and symbolically stripped off every symbol of his crew before walking silently up to the house, staring dully at Sam until Marci shoves Sam to the side and demands the boy come in before dinner gets too cold.

Once Sam sees a thin, raggedy man stop just outside their door with a small, ragged bundle in his arms. All of the kids gathered in the windows, watching a he hugged a sobbing nine-year-old tightly before heading off into the city. The kids sweep the newest arrival off to do whatever happens when a new citizen arrives, and Sam mentally adds one more to his foraging tally.

They never ask him for anything, never complain, but Sam nevertheless finds himself scouting new, defensible locations for his growing army of brats. He finds it almost by accident, a cluster of buildings with a large, defensible courtyard in the middle. It gets enough sun to grow crops, and if they can rig a makeshift greenhouse for the rapidly approaching winter months, there’s already a garden on the roof running wild. The buildings together have more rooms than he can imagine filling.

Perfect.


	6. Mer

Mer hovers at the edge of a gated, sprawling sanatorium, Ruby’s address crumpled in her fist. She hadn’t had anywhere better to go, but she hadn’t expected a mental institution in the middle of Nowhere, Georgia. 

She runs her fingertips over the barrier, feels the spells worked into the wrought iron perimeter flair to life: healing, calmness, layers of gentle security, non-violent and soothing before the mean stuff kicks in. Why in the world would Ruby send her here?

Mer shoulders her bag and heads in, feeling the wards wrap tight around her, aware that she’s always dangerous, and then slide off like water when they sense no ill intent.

There’s a large central compound surrounded by smaller structures that scatter the farther into the property they go. The main path leads to a large clubhouse just in front of the main hospital, containing a reception desk manned by three people in nurse’s scrubs. 

“Hi! Welcome to Warm Springs. How can we help you?” Mer knows the sheer amount of irritation she feels at the man’s wide, genuine smile isn’t healthy. But she can’t help he. He’s not just happy, he’s _content._ It rolls off him in unavoidable waves. Days past she would have been searching suspiciously for some kind of magical or demonic influence. For a moment, she contemplates running away, but Ken (so his name tag tells her) tilts his head invitingly, his smile turning a little sad and knowing.

“I’m not entirely sure,” Mer sighs.

“Okay. You’d be surprised at how often that happens here. Are you…looking for someone you lost?” 

What a question. Mer’s spoiled for choice in how to answer, but for all Ken’s annoying pep, she doesn’t think he’s paid enough to deal with Winchester-level existential crises. 

“I think so?” she settles on, because she’s had the sense of moving towards something important to her, she’s just not sure _what._ Or why it would be in Georgia. 

“Psychic?” he asks, giving her an entirely unwarranted conspiratorial look.

“Winchester,” she says, the word slicing through the air, and that gives him pause, the jovial grin fading into wide-eyed surprise.

“Oh.” It’s said so softly and subdued. The smile, when it comes back—she’s pretty sure Ken’s the kind of person to smile even when he’s crying—is tinged with sadness. “You’re here for Daniel Chu.” 

\---

“Ms. Winchester?” 

Mer stares unseeingly at the door in front of her.

Warm Springs is a light, open refuge that houses a broad spectrum of people suffering from…well, Apocalyptic trauma. Whatever it was before, it’s been turned into a well run long-term care facility for those with significant supernatural injuries. The baseline human version of Firewall, with a post-Apocalyptic twist.

The big building is a pretty standard mental hospital set up, though the atmosphere is different than any hospital Mer’s ever felt. Much more serene and…healing, lacking the usual suffering and darkness that pervades such places. The second biggest building is the psychic trauma unit; it feels a lot like the healing cottage in Firewall. The rest of the sprawling buildings are staff residence and other long term and care arrangements.

It’s nice. Really nice. Really very…nice. 

“I pulled Danny’s file for you, if you’d like to see it.”

Someone slides down the wall and settles on the ground next to her. There’s no way to know how long they stay there, Mer catching glimpses of Danny as people open and close the door. He sits alone at a table building something absolutely spectacular out of K’Nex until an orderly hands him an old, beat up radio and his face lights up in uncomplicated joy. Danny unrolls a familiar toolkit, blue canvass worn and ragged, and sets about fixing it, bottom lip clenched in his teeth. When he’s done, ha shows the orderly his work with a beaming, child-like smile. The tip of his tongue peeks out from between his lips when he tries to concentrate. 

Mer feels the tears escape and slide down her face.

“Give me the highlights?” 

“From what we can tell, he suffered severe brain trauma. The kind that he shouldn’t have survived. But someone…or something...patched the damage. Whatever it was—”

“Gabriel,” Mer says, her voice hoarse. “The archangel Gabriel. That _asshole._ ” Mer scrubs a hand over her face then turns to look at the fresh-faced doctor (is he a doctor? Who decides that? Does it really mean anything anymore?).

“The arch...right. Wow. Okay. So you really are...” He blushes bright red. It’s kind of fascinating how completely his complexion changes.

“Is. Danny. Is he...” How the hell is she supposed to finish that sentence? 

“He’s happy. Mentally vacillates between about five and ten depending on the day and situation, which makes for an enormous breadth of understanding. But he’s a genius at repairing anything mechanical, which we let him do with appropriate supervision. He’s never been violent or dangerous. And he talks about you.” Mer flinches, tugs at a thread unraveling from her jeans. She should get some new ones. “You, and someone named Tricks?”

“Trix,” she drawls, rolling the name on her tongue. “He’s…not real. Anymore. Never was. Fucking _Gabriel.”_ The doctor makes some kind of noncommittal noise and they stay there, leaning against the wall, watching Danny construct something unbearably beautiful and complex out of his K’Nex set.

“He’d like to see you.” Mer doesn’t give any indication she’s heard him. “If that—if it helps you make a decision. He’ll likely recognize you.”

“And when I leave?” she asks, bitterness making the words sharp. The doctor looks away, uncomfortable.

One of the pieces to Danny’s masterpiece won’t adhere correctly. It keeps falling off the top, and on the fourth try it falls at just the right angle to bring the entire structure crashing to the table. Danny stares at it for a second before he screams and swipes the entire thing onto the floor, crying. An orderly rushes over to sooth him, but Danny’s committed to a full-blown temper tantrum.

“He’s really happy, huh?” Mer says.

“He is!”

Another orderly rushes over and injects a sedative into his arm. The pain of the injection slices through the tantrum and they can hear the wounded, “Ow,” Danny lets out.

“I can see that,” she says, caustic, and stalks off down the hall.

\---

The doctor finds her in a bar, sitting at a four top in a corner with one foot braced against the table, a fifth of Jack on the table in front of her. He sits down without invitation and she pushes the tumbler towards him without a word; _never drink alone if you can help it_ had been one of her parent’s rules. 

He drinks with reverence; he probably hasn’t seen a name brand bottle of alcohol in months. Maybe years.

“I’d forgotten how good that was,” he says when it’s gone. “When they’d start distributing again?”

“Haven’t,” Mer says. “Private stock. Brought it with me. Thought I’d need it.” She pours him another and sends a bitter mental toast up towards Gabriel. She hopes the fucker’s watching.

“Am I playing catch up?” he asks, drinking this second glass a little slower. 

“Wouldn’t recommend it.” The corner of her mouth curls up sardonically. “You know, I don’t even like whisky? Just...seemed like the thing to do. What’s your name?”

“Oh. Oh! Uh, Allen. Dr. Sharpe. Al—Doctor Allen, uh, Sharpe.”

“You sound real certain there, Dr. Allen-uh-Sharpe.”

“I don’t really, uh...associate with many people who aren’t patients or co-workers? And a lot of the people in this town are family of patients, so. So, uh, yeah, I may be...out of practice.” When he glances up, his blush fading into pink, Mer’s looking at him oddly.

“Out of practice with what?” He blinks at her and there goes that blush again, radioactive and intense. His emotions are confusing; his aura’s a staunch healer’s green in direct contrast to his skin. Mer feels frustration rising, feeling limited and handicapped by the current state of her powers. She distracts herself with more alcohol, resisting the urge to make a face at the taste.

“Humanity in general. You should see him. Danny, I mean.” Mer’s lips thin and she takes a swig straight from the bottle. “Look, I know what it looked like. But that’s...it happens. Occasionally. Patients have bad days. People have bad days. Danny has bad days, but not a lot. Most of the time, he’s okay. Better than. Just. Please. He talks about you, loves you, and I can tell you love him. I’ve seen that look in my patients and their families. I think it’d, uh, help. You both. In my professional opinion.”

They make eye contact at the end of his stumbling yet impassioned speech and the silence stretches between them. Mer’s a frozen morass of inner turmoil. She can’t reconcile the...the person in that sunny medical ward with _Danny._

“But what do I know? I was only part way through medical school when the world went to shit.” Mer startles out of her musings and takes in the slight downturn of Dr. Sharpe’s lips, eyes fixed on the tabletop and drawing his finger through the water rings. There’s more than a little bitterness in there, and Mer senses the impression of skeptical people who have come before her.

“Okay.”

“Uh, what?”

“I’ll go see Danny.” He blinks owlishly at here. It’s not and attractive look. “But you should really stop undermining your own credibility. People can do that just fine without your input.”

“You sound like my mom.”

“Ugh, and here I thought we were going to be friends, Dr. Sharpe.”

\---

Danny is happy.

He’s happy in the way little kids are happy, uncomplicated and with every part of themselves. When he sees Mer he lights up—in a very literal way. His aura sparks and takes over Mer’s vision, a swirl of purple and green jewel tones that leave her blinking.

“Merry-Mer-Mer!” His arms wrap around her and squeeze. It takes her a second to hug him back, but when she does she doesn’t want to let go. Danny’s alive, and he’s _happy,_ , though he misses his friends in an undefined way—it’s more a feeling of something missing than a concrete understanding of what. She can feel joy bubbling under his skin, and he’s so _excited_ that she’s here, Mer starts laughing. She feels high.

When they pull away Danny makes a distressed sound and touches the tear tracks on her cheeks, a frown cutting through the sunny day.

“No. No, they’re...good tears. Happy tears.” She smiles for him, remembers the warm sense of joy coming from Danny and works to let it in, then tries to project it back to him. It’s a pale imitation of what he feels, than what Mer knows she’s felt before, but it’s a start. Feels good.

He pulls her down to show her the new K’Nex set he’s been given, explaining in excited words that run together what he’s going to do, and they spend the day building things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, Danny <3 Trix did what he could to save his friend in the end.


	7. Dean

Dean’s pretty sure Mer and Sam didn’t have to face the gauntlet of disapproving stares that greet him when he steps outside his hospital cottage, a backpack slung over his shoulder.

“Y’all’re going to be sorely disappointed if you try to convince me to stay,” Dean warns, and hates the deep Southern twang that works its way into his speech. Missouri snorts and shakes her head at him. Bobby looks extra grumpy.

“Boy, we all survived the Apocalypse together. We don’t waste our time with pointless shit these day.” Bobby, ever the blunt instrument. 

“We just want to make sure you know this is stupid and borderline suicidal,” Leslie jumps in.

“Like innumerable decisions Dean Winchester makes, such things concern him not,” Kai says, arch and catty. 

“Peace,” Atlahua requests, wringing his hands. “Please, my friends.” He really shouldn’t have been sucked into their family drama.

“If you’re not here to talk me out of it,” Dean says, voice sharp and curt, “then why are you here? Because believe me, I know none of you are on board with this.”

Missouri dangles a set of car keys in front of his face, and Dean doesn’t need psychic powers to know everything in her thinks he’s a moron.

“We just thought we’d give you the best chance you can,” she says, smugness radiating off of her.

Dean takes the keys and wraps Missouri in a hug. She laughs quietly in his ear and hugs him back, and he lets himself sink into her for a moment longer than he should. Bobby’s next, and looks incredibly uncomfortable the whole time, muscles tense even after they’ve turned the hug into manly backslapping. Leslie’s too mad at him, offers her hand and then stalks off. Atlahua guides Dean’s hand to his chest, right over Atlahua’s heart, and mirrors the gesture. He blesses them both in _náhuatl_ before scurrying after Leslie, and isn’t _that_ an interesting development? Which leaves Kai. 

Unmovable, unflinching, uncompromising Kai.

Xe steps up to Dean and pulls their foreheads together. Lets their breath mingle.

“Wherever you may travel, wherever you may land, set your table for three,” Kai advises softly.

“Sure,” Dean says, clearing his throat when his voice breaks. “I’ll do that.”

They watch him, his knot of extended family, as he walks away from the safety they represent.

***

“Baby,” Dean whispers, stroking the car’s shiny black interior. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed her until he opens the door of the storage unit and glimpsed the bottom of her wheel underneath the dust shield. His heart had skipped a beat.

He slides behind the wheel and feels complete. He strokes the wheel and settles into the bucket seat. 

She starts up perfectly. The growling purr of her engine turns him on a little.

“Oh yeah. Let’s do this.”

He peels out, Baby roaring around him, and drives without a destination in mind.

Overall it’s slow going. The roads are starting to crumble in a pretty major way and Dean WILL NOT lose his baby to a freaking pothole. Sometimes he loses entire days going around roadblocks, either a sea of impassable cars of the attempted mass exodus from bigger cities or intentionally put there by survivors. 

In spite of Baby’s wards and his somewhat dubious personal shields—which are holding, thank you VERY much, Kai—he has a constant low-grade headache that settles in moments after he steps across Firewall’s boundary. He barely makes it five miles in the first two days, after the pain spikes and it’s almost bad enough that he considers going back. 

The first day, he gets a nosebleed that won’t stop, leaving him lightheaded and aching. The second day might be the worst hangover he’s ever had. It hurts to move. To breathe, to think, to flex a single muscle in his body. He chokes down some water, exactly one third of a saltine, and four sleeping pills. He throws the saltines and most of the sleeping pills back up, but there’s enough sedative left in his system that he sleeps through the night and wakes up feeling mostly human at the end of day 3. 

A very sick human, but he’s lived through worse.

The bumpy back road driving doesn’t exactly help his headache situation, but he can’t imagine walking would be a better alternative, and you can claw Baby’s key out of his cold, dead rigor mortis hands.

The world has changed so much in the time he spent unconscious. People are rebuilding, but people’s appetites for large settlements and cities are gone. Intimate towns and communities are the name of the game, people seeking solace in the familiar. Places where everybody knows your name or you get shot. Dean gets very good at figuring out who might welcome him and who would rather ask questions later only if they have to.

And it’s freaking weird living in a world where people know about the supernatural. Everyone’s got wards these days, and people are constantly comparing notes about the efficacy of various Old Wives’ Tales. 

But while people are flourishing and ready to get back to the way (some) things were, putting their broken infrastructure back together is slow going—though the US almost has a working cellular network back up, emergency relief supplies are being disseminated by “the US military” which seems to be comprised of “whoever is left and wants to serve,” and people have started booting the internet back up. Priorities. (Dean doesn’t cry the first time he logs on, absolutely not, also isn’t it hilarious that Hotmail is the first commercial e-mail service to get its servers back up and running?)

Overall, things go pretty well, there are only a few moments of mortal peril. Before, Dean would have been waiting for the other shoe to drop with increasing levels of paranoia. He’s not wasting his time with that anymore. He thinks he’s earned a run of good luck and cooperation from the world—it quite literally owes him.

He starts taking people’s mail with him if he’s going in its general direction, which earns him good will and an easy in most places; and most of them are willing to pay him in gasoline. Once, he’s able to bring a woman word of her sister from one state over and the whole town parties like they survived the Apocalypse again.

As he goes on, Dean’s more and more certain that he’s ultimately headed towards Chicago. Which is interesting, because he’s never actually been there, and to his knowledge, neither has Sam. Kind of sucks that they’ll never know what it was like Before.

Then again, there’s a lot they never saw or did Before.

Dean isn’t prepared for how much the first look at Chicago’s broken, jagged skyline _hurts._

\---

Dean walks through the ruined city, avoiding the shadows as best he can by habit, following the pull in his chest (he left Baby well-hidden as close to the city as he dared to get, and plans to find an actual garage to put her in as soon as he tracks down Sam). He glimpses people here and there, but most everyone keeps their distance. He notes at least three groups wearing similar colors and if he’s come all this way just find out Sam’s somehow become King of the Gangs…

He comes to a junction—a collapsed building, the detritus forcing him to chose right or left—and pauses. He’s been followed the last few blocks by two fairly well trained shadows, but now there’re at least four lurking in the shadows, two taking the high ground, and that makes him nervous. 

He’s close to Sam, close enough that he can feel the difference of even a few steps in the wrong direction. Sam’s currently a little more to the right than Dean’s moving. The right hand path looks thoroughly unappealing compared to the left, ominous and dirty instead of clear and straight. Classic misdirection and subtle warning all in one.

Dean slips his hand in his pockets and turns towards the pull in his chest; even at his darkest Sam would never let anyone hurt him.

“Freeze, sucka’.” Dean stops and takes in the skinny teen pointing a shotgun at him. 

“Really?” Dean asks, dry as a bone. The gun’s a lot of inches too long to fit the kid; the kickback’ll hit him harder than it should, off balance him no matter if he’s prepared, so if Dean can dodge the first assault and get in close enough, he can win this fight, and well before backup can arrive to boot.

But Dean’s not here to fight. Well, not with a bunch of kids, at least.

“I’m lookin’ for Sam.”

“Dunno wotcher talkin’ about.”

“Then I’ll be on my way.” Dean takes a step to the side but the kid mirrors him, keeping just out of striking distance.

“Find another road.”

“I could do that,” Dean says agreeably, “but I’d still just end up at Sam, and I don’t feel like taking the long way. So unless you actually plan on using that, get the gun out of my face.” The kid scowls at him, missing intimidating by a mile.

“Like I said, don’t know—”

“He don’t want to see you.”

“Marci!” Dean turns his body so he can see the girl who’s come up behind him—Marci, apparently—while keeping the boy in sight. Damned if she isn’t doing a pretty spectacular version of Sam’s best BitchFace.

“Shut up, Benji. Don’t use names.” She glares at Dean and he’s having flashback to Mer at 13. “Sam don’t want to see you.”

“Well that’s just too bad, Princess, ‘cause I’m not leaving until we talk. So why don’t you put on your happy face and show me where he is. He already knows I’m here.”

“You don’t get to tell me what to do,” Marci says, crossing her arms and glaring. “And don’t call me princess. I ain’t.”

The boy moves towards them as they talk; to his credit, the gun never wavers, but Dean’s seen enough killers to know this kid isn’t one. The second he steps into reach, Dean strikes out, forcing the barrel of the gun toward the sky and wrenching it out of Benji’s hands. The boy squawks, Marci yells, and Dean calmly cracks the barrel, removing the shells. It’s a well-maintained piece, which is what he’d expect from Sam.

The teenagers are yelling at each other, showing a startling lack of self-preservation. Dean could have killed them a million different ways since he took the gun.

He raises his fingers to his lips and lets out a piercing whistle that startles the two teenagers into silence.

“Done? Good. Now get the rest of your friends to come down here, quitcher bitchin’, and take me to Sam. That last part,” he says, glaring his best Dad Glare at the girl before she can voice her protest, “is happening with or without you.” The boy shifts on his feet, waiting to see what Marci decides. With a final, haughty glare, she lets out some sort of hooting faux birdcall thing that’s straight out of the movies. Christ.

Five kids of all ages appear in doorways; one shimmies down from a roof in a heart-stopping maneuver Dean would ground Mer for at any age. The youngest kid is tiny and Dean has the abrupt revelation that she’s lived most of the life she can remember in this broken world. She walks up to him and reaches her arms out in the universal sign for “up.” 

Dean obliges before he can quite process the thought, and by the time he thinks better of it she’s latched onto his lapels and smiling at him. Her eyes, oddly, are not quite focused on him. She touches his heart and smiles wider, and it feels like she’s plucked the string between him and Sam. It resonates, rich with their history, and brings tears to Dean’s eyes. The little girl reaches up and kisses cheek, then settles into his chest and closes her eyes.

\---

They follow him straight to their home. Marci hadn’t tried to stop him again, but she hadn’t tried to help either, and has become increasingly mad the closer Dean gets to Sam. She glares and stomps by him when he makes the final turn and stops in his tracks. 

They’ve claimed a partially covered courtyard between three large buildings and protected by a high, wrought iron fence—the kind very rich people from Before used to make their exclusivity look pretty. They’ve turned it into a thriving commune, every dirt space overflowing with gardens, green vines climbing up the walls.

Most of the denizens appear to be kids, teenagers and younger. They’re doing all the jobs—kids patrolling, kids working the gardens, kids chasing other kids around as laughter bounces off the walls. A bit of brightness in the wasteland that is Chicago. A refuge. There are a few adults in the mix, but Dean gets the sense that most adults don’t get the chance to earn the trust of these tiny survivors, and not just because of the way everyone stops to eyeball him as he walks by with his escorts. (There are shadows in their eyes that turn his stomach; he looks deeper at one of them and almost drops the kid in his arms. He’s probably going to have nightmares for the foreseeable future. Not all of life’s atrocities were committed by demons.)

His bleeding heart little brother really outdid himself here, but Dean can’t deny that Sam’s built something incredible.

“Come on, freeloader,” Princess Marci says. His little limpet shimmies down to the ground and runs off. Marci leads him towards the central building.

“Where are we going?” Sam’s close enough that Dean has to concentrate to pinpoint his location. His heart starts beating faster.

“Inside.”

“Thank you, Princess Smartass. Is Sam inside?” This is Sam’s territory now and it all feels like him; Dean would have to really concentrate to pick out where he physically is, and he’s too hyped up for that, so close after so long.

“Nope.”

“Yeah, okay, I already have one sassy teenager I’m biologically forced to deal with, can we lose the attitude?” Marci gives him a flat look and Dean sighs. “Didn’t think so.” 

Dean takes a deep breath, centers himself as much as he can, and then reaches. Marci’s a bundle of angry emotions that reminds Dean of Mer so acutely he gasps. His awareness extends to the rest of the kids, bright points of awareness, then flows up. Sam’s definitely in that building. If not “inside,” then on the roof or a balcony—so not _technically_ inside. Snarky damned smartass fuckin’ _teenagers._

He feels a tug in his chest, impatient.

He attributes the racing of his heart to the endless flights of stairs they have to climb up to get to the roof, which has been converted into a hothouse. Panes of glass and plastic have been carefully put together to protect a nurture rows and rows of, pungent herbs, green plants bearing fruits, and root vegetables in deep pots. He can hear the clucking of chickens from somewhere near by.

And in the center, tying a tomato plant to a cage...

“Hey, Sammy. Nice digs.”

His brother’s wearing baggy clothes, but Dean thinks that’s to hide how thin Sam really is. He’s got a gigantic, untrimmed beard covering half his face but still looks haggard, deep circles under his eyes and lines settling deep on his face. Sam always was terrible at taking care of himself, and Dean’s including Sam’s health food obsession in that because no way is a pie-less diet good for anyone.

It’s a good thing Dean found him.

“They let you through. I wasn’t sure you’d make it.” Sam glances at him, and Dean thinks he’s smirking under that bushy beard. Dean can’t wait to lop it off. “They usually have taste. Jerk.”

“Except they let you in didn’t they, bitch?” Dean leans against a garden box, watching Sam work. “Small and silent vouched for me.”

“Gilda? Hmmm.”

“What’s the supposed to mean?” Instead of answering, Sam rolls a plant cage towards him. Dean stares at his brother for a beat before picking up the wire cage and settling in to work next to him. 

He can’t get a read on Sam. His aura is the most neutral, placid thing Dean’s encountered yet. Sometimes flairs of color arc out and away (and Dean would swear some of them are reaching for him, but he’s never encountered that before, and he doesn’t have the bandwidth to figure out what that means right now), but everything else is just…packed away. Muted and contained.

They work in silence, their movements smooth as they dance around one another. Sam sparks red-pink for a moment when their hands brush together packing dirt around delicate roots before going right back to its neutral placidity.

This weird zen mountain man thing has to be a joke, but somewhere between starting the apocalypse and ending it, Dean learned some actual patience, and Dean will wait Sam out. For as long as it takes. To the end of the world and back again.


	8. Mer, Dean

Life at Warm Springs is simple, routine and easy. 

Mer thinks she may have become a nurse in another life. Not a doctor, that takes far more school and memorization than she’ll ever enjoy, and she likes interacting with people more than diagnosing them with problems. She spends her mornings with Danny, and her evenings working in whatever ward needs an extra hand that day. The nurses and orderlies teach her the ropes, pass on precious practical knowledge that’s beyond value After.

The only place she can’t work is the psychic trauma unit. Hits way too close to home and she spends three days feeling cold and shivering in the aftermath of that one. 

At some point, Dr. Sharpe becomes Allen, and Head Nurse Chapel becomes Erin, and Mer has coworkers she sees every day and patients who light up whenever she walks in their room. She helps a thirteen year old girl named Grace voluntarily walk outside for the first time in three years, cries tears of joy when Grace turns her face up to the sun with a shaky but present smile. But then the tears wouldn’t stop, grew harder and harder until Mer’s doubled over, gasping for breath and breaking down in the hot Georgia sun. Probably ruining Grace’s progress.

She wakes up in one of the low-impact rooms feeling empty, a little floaty, and exhausted to her bones. But…okay. And maybe something shook loose.

The staff give her a lot of hugs and soft smiles but other than that no one treats her any different after a week, so things go back to normal. She hangs with Danny, goes to work, Drinks with Allen, plays board games with Erin and her wife Jill, then goes to sleep so she can do it all again tomorrow.

Mer wakes up one morning, makes herself coffee, eats breakfast with Danny, and knows it’s time to go. It’s been over six months, almost seven, and it’s just...time.

She actually warns people she’s leaving, ignores that aggressively Winchester part of herself that tells her to just cut bait and move on. Some of her patients don’t take it well and it breaks her heart feeling their anguish wash over her.

Surprisingly, Danny’s the easiest to say good-bye to. He’s present and aware when they hug, a little longer and tighter than normal. He presses a small LED flashlight into her hand. It’s tiny and portable, but brighter than most and, she’s willing to bet, longer lasting. She steps away and lets Danny’s sadness wash over her. Then Nurse Soren shows up with a broken portable generator and his emotions even out into uncomplicated contentment.

Allen’s in his office filling out paper work when she knocks on his door.

“Lunch isn’t for—oh.” He blinks rapidly at her. “Oh.”

“Yeah.” In the time she’s been here, Allen’s come into his own. Warm Springs had been doing its best without access to meds or supplies, or any kind of support whatsoever. Mer had put him in touch with Firewall and Berferd, who’d sent someone out to assess the operation. Within two weeks they’d been patched into the supply lines Missouri and Bobby have been running: food, medical paraphernalia, information and, most importantly, real medication and trained support staff.

But that’s not what makes this place special. Mer hadn’t been imagining the healing aura of Warm Springs. Somehow, in warding this place the way he has, through some natural talent, or some random jumble of things, Allen has turned his hospital into a sanctified space imbued with healing and rejuvenation. There are three such places in the world—one in Australia and one in the middle of Africa—that they know of. One of the first trans-Atlantic flights being made in this Brave New World is to bring the Best and Brightest from around the world to Warm Springs so they can learn from him, hopefully try to recreate the effect.

Mer thinks they’re not going to be able to, because the secret ingredient is Allen and his innate goodness seeping into everything.

She’s going to miss him something fierce.

“Danny—”

“Soren gave him a generator to fix. My farewell got a bit overshadowed.”

“Oh. Right. I. How are we going to do this without you?” He looks so lost that Mer has to laugh, and it’s a real laugh filled with affection and mirth.

“Allen. Al-en-non, light of my life, doctor of my friend, Healer in the Here After—“

“Oh my god, stop,” Allen moans, hiding his bright red face behind his hands. He has been called all of these things and more by thankful patients and grateful families—okay, ‘doctor of my friend’ was Mer’s frankly inspired addition to the long list of titles being kept in the nurse’s break room—and hasn’t figured out how to stop blushing yet. She hopes he never does.

“I spend my days watching DVDs in Danny’s rec room and my nights plying you with increasingly awful bottles of liquor. I have nothing to do with the running of this place. What do you need me for?”

“I-I, well, um.” Mer smiles, not unkindly, and gives him a warm kiss on the cheek. His aura pulses with attraction, but it’s...she grew up with two people who were actual soul mates, and Whit and Damien, who were a far healthier example of utter devotion. She knows what true love looks like and can’t help but want it for herself. And for him. There’s a thin, nearly transparent string of red-gold stretching away from him, into the distance, and while she’s never seen anything like it before, she’s pretty sure she knows what it means. She gives it a gentle flick as she pulls away and sees it pulse briefly. 

“You’re going to change the world, Dr. Allen Sharpe. You already have.”

“We’ll miss you,” he says, wrapping her up in a hug. “I’ll miss you.” 

The hug for a while, and she allows herself to enjoy the simple peace of holding someone she cares about.

“Thank you,” she whispers with all sincerity when they let go. She’s pretty sure Warm Springs can add one more success to their patient tally when she leaves.

“Where will you go?” he asks, pulling away. His eyes are suspiciously damp.

“Home.”

***

Dean tends to think of himself as ‘in shape.’ Like, overall. He’s been killing ghosts and various baddies for most of his life. He runs. He can do that sexy chair balance dip move from Magic Mike and everyone can shove it the ladies freaking _love it_ and it is _not easy._

None of that prepares him for the day-to-day grind of survival in Chicago.

He hauls chicken wire, potting soil, pots and plant braces up to the greenhouse, taking the stairs one flight at a time as willowy preteens give him pitying old man looks, some of them making two trips to his one.

There’s constant maintenance on the buildings, foraging runs, tending crops and animals, laundry, just finding clothes for growing kids, and of course supplies for the youngest of their denizens. Also, kids keep drifting into their little community, so the amount of everything they need keeps growing. It’s never ending, and neither he nor Sam like sending the kids out into the city, so it’s always one of them who go poking around the concrete jungle.

The third time Dean goes out alone he stumbles into a gang patrol, whichever one has picked yellow for their color. They surround him, jeering, brandishing heavy bludgeoning weapons and a couple of guns between them.

“Lookin’ slick there, hoss,” the one who thinks he’s the leader says. The rabble laugh and the potential for violence ticks higher. But there’s one girl who hangs back, silent and observing, and while they’re taking their cues from the obnoxious one, all of them are very aware of where she is at all times. 

Dean goads three of the toadies into attacking him. He takes care of them handily, making sure his movements leave him standing in front of the girl. He pulls his pistol from the hidden holster under his jacket and aims it at her head.

Everyone freezes, waiting for her signal. She simply looks at him, one eyebrow rising in question, no fear on her. Dean really hopes this works. He lowers his gun and engages the safety with an audible click.

“I’m with Sam,” he says. She smirks and runs an appraising eye up and down his body, ending with a questioning tilt to her head. “Yeah. Like that.” She huffs a laugh and the violence passes.

“Y’still got all’a dem kids?” 

“More and more every day,” he says wryly.

“You can hunt on the outskirts of our turf,” she tells him. “Just leaves us some, whatever you find.”

“Oookay. How much?” Dean asks. His confusion at this open-ended offer is mirrored by the other gang members, especially the three Dean put down and clearly want a rematch.

“However much is fair,” she returns, implacable. That…is not how these things usually work, but there’s nowhere he can really go with this negotiation so Dean finally just shrugs his acceptance. She twirls her fingers and they start moving out.

“And get you some colors sos we know you, Rainbow,” she calls over her shoulder.

The next time Dean goes out he’s got rainbows sewed on his jacket and pack, and a multicolored kerchief mad of braided cloth scraps. 

She finds him three weeks later, stands at the periphery of his current search long enough so he can see her laughing before she disappears. Word must spread because the first time he runs into a patrolling group of Red-aligned gang members they leave him alone with a brief nod once they see his patches.

.

.

.

.

.

The thing about all of this is Sam barely reacts to any of it. He should be worried Dean ran into those gangs and relieved they’ve got a truce going on. He should be mocking Dean for turning himself into a one-man Pride parade while giving Dean that soft little side-eye that means he’s secretly a pretty pleased princess. He should be yelling, hating, fighting, fucking, what-ever-ing with Dean.

Instead, he walks through the world like a ghost, barely present, doing what he has to, sleeping, then doing it all again the next day. It worries Dean more than how he’ll feed 40 kids when they’re teenagers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lil bit of a filler chapter, but there are EMOTIONS on the horizon


	9. Mer

Nothing’s changed.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. The road’s pretty holey, a lot of the buildings and houses look abandoned, and the grass on the side of the road is as high as her hip. But Mer can still navigate these streets on instinct and soon pulls up to a white split level that haunts her dreams.

She stares at it, the shutters faded to a green-grey and the white paint peeling away in places. The yard is overgrown and there’s a huge chunk of concrete missing from the driveway but it’s...it’s her house.

She half thought Sam would take the first opportunity to have it razed to the ground, but their quiet little town mostly looks abandoned, and now that she thinks about it, there hadn’t been a lot of demonic activity in Iowa during the Apocalypse in general.

Movement in one of the upstairs windows has Mer on alert and drawing her gun; most of the windows have been boarded up and reinforced so she can’t get a good look inside but—

“Freeze!” Mer starts; it’s been a very long time since someone’s managed to sneak up on her. “Hands up!”

Mer slowly raises her hands, gun dangling from her index finger. She hears the scuff of a shoe, feels the air displacing behind her. She takes a breath and strikes out towards where her assailant should be. She hits a wrist with enough force to direct the gun away from herself. She draws her hand along the wrist, over the closed fist, grabbing the slide and popping it free of the base of the gun, effectively dismantling the pistol, in a move it took her almost a decade to master. 

She spins in place, her hand with the gun coming up to strike her assailant in the chest when—

Mer’s breath catches. She pulls her strike so the woman stumbles back with a pained “oof” instead of laying out flat on the ground, the wind knocked out of her and sternum possibly broken.

The hair’s longer and a couple colors not found in nature, and she handles a gun fairly competently in spite of how Mer just deconstructed it without looking, but it’s unmistakably Vivienne standing there gawping, hand to chest.

“Viv. Hey.”

A beat passes, then another, and just when she wonders if they’ve forgotten her—

“Mary? _Winchester?_ ” Viv drops what’s left of her gun—and Mary can’t help the instinctive flinch at such rough handling of a weapon—and throws herself at Mer, hugging her like someone might try to pry them apart. It takes Mer a stunned moment to reciprocate, her good arm coming around as she flicks the safety of her gun on (no way in hell is she dropping her favorite piece on the ground) and shit. Viv smells just like Mer remembers.

People must have been watching because they start spilling out of the house, people she recognizes, a few she doesn’t and…tiny versions of people, too. Chelsea, Lissa, Jer, Dane…

Jesus, they’re all here. 

They all _survived._

The relief leaves her weak. She’d hoped and wondered and never once truly believed they’d all be okay. 

***

The party they throw feels like high school all over again. There a few new players, but the main cast of characters is there: Max, who’s still super short but mostly grew out of his issues with that; Viv, just as sharp and biting as ever and their defacto leader; Dane, ever the joker but with an undercurrent of sadness that makes Mer want to hug him and never let go; Chelsea, who used to dream about New York but is as fiercely protective about their little town as a mamma bear these days; Jer and Lissa both finally figured their shit out and have six-month-old twins (twins!), though Jer is less cocky, quieter, an angry burn marring half his face and curling down his neck. 

Max has a three-year-old with his cute button nose and wide, brown eyes. Mer doesn’t need any kind of special abilities to know not to ask about the mother. Other people trickle in as word spreads. Lena McInty and Dana Mendoza are a thing now, which what? Who saw _that_ coming?

“Right?” Viv breathes, head resting on Mer’s shoulder. “Guess the apocalypse brings out the gay in people.” She times it perfectly so Mer’s just taking a sip of some (surprisingly decent) homebrew and sprays it out her nose in a most elegant fashion. It burns.

They’re all pretty thoroughly drunk and loose when another person shows up and Mer’s heart skips a beat. It can’t be. Castiel is trapped in Heaven with all the rest of the angels, gates to Earth slammed shut and soldered closed. 

“Finn.” Viv says lazily, waving with her glass. “Say hello.” And Mer can’t breathe for another reason entirely.

“Found a new friend, Madame Vivienne?” Finn says with a bow, ever playing the gallant. “Hello, I’m—”

“Finnigan,” Mer says, aiming for lofty and failing. She drinks in the sight of him, older, figured out a haircut that works for him somewhere along the way, and far more aware of himself than in high school. But still unmistakably her Finn. 

His face goes blank and he stumbles to a stop, some of his high school clumsiness coming back with his shock. He blinks at her dumbly before awareness creeps in and his jaw drops open.

“Holy shit. Win-cheese-ster?” She feels absolutely giddy when he slams into her, like when they were kids and so excited to see on another that they would have bruises because of how hard they connected. 

They topple onto the ground, mindless of the dirt and grass. Fuck, she’s missed him. It hits her then just how much she’s missed them all. Every single one of these glorious, wonderful people, who have managed to live their lives and survive in the face of the End Times.

After that, it’s a _party,_ no holds barred, like it’s 1999. 

People start showing up from all around. There are new faces, old faces, missing faces. They’ve all suffered horrors and hardship, but here and now everyone is laughing and celebrating. And Mer gets to catch up with her people, catalog the changes in them, wonder what they see in her.

Most of them haven’t connected her family with the jumble of Apocalyptic rumors that made it around, though Winchester is practically a household name these days, the bare bones of their story whispered from person to person in the way these things get around. Apparently versions of their story have even made it as far as India, the details twisted through an international game of telephone. She wonders what will happen when her friends realize they’d been there at the start. She can tell which ones have burning questions they’re sitting on. 

Even that, though, isn’t enough to break the feeling of contentment that settles over Mer like a warm blanket.

By the end of the night (or, rather, the beginning of the day) it’s just her and Finn sitting outside at a picnic table watching the sunrise over the cornfield, sharing a beer. She’s got a good buzz going on, and feels...pretty pleased with the world. Huh.

“So what was that look for?”

“Hhhmmm?” she asks, rolling her head so she can see him.

“You looked at me like you’d seen a ghost.”

“There aren’t anymore ghosts.”

“Dude, I know that. You know what I mean. What gives?”

"It's just...you kind of look like this angel I used to know."

"That is the worst line I've ever heard, Winchester." Mer shoots Finn an exasperated glance at the same time he gives her a fond one, and they end up grinning at each other like idiots.

“Angels are real.”

“Oh yeah?” He leans in and gives her a cheesy, seductive look. “Do you know because you fell from Heaven, baby?” She throws back her head and laughs, amusement and bonhomie bubbling over. It feels...amazing. Cathartic. Necessary. She can't stop, the laughter taking on a life of its own growing deeper, fuller, until there are tears falling down her cheeks and her stomach hurts. Finn watches her indulgently, if a little wary. 

Mer slides off the bench, muscles turning to jelly. She ends up leaning against his legs, little giggle aftershocks escaping from time to time as she calms down.

“I didn’t think it was that funny,” he says, running his hands over the shaved part of her head. It feels nice, better than when she does it to herself. 

“It is if you knew any of them. Angels really are real. They’re mostly dicks. Well, they’re all dicks, just some of them are dicks in funny ways, and a couple of them aren’t only dicks. But you happen to look like my favorite. His name was Castiel.”

“Hey!” Finn protests, flexing his thigh muscle and making her head bounce. She glares at him for moving, but he just grins down at her, unconcerned with her ire. “I think you’ve got that backwards—Castiel clearly looks like _me._ I was here first!” He watches in fascination as she processes what he said. Her expression of mirth gives over to confusion, then surprise. Then blankness with a hint of panic creeping in around the edges. "Mer?"

She looks at him, stares, and then really starts to panic.

“Um. I need to…” She staggers to her feet, catching herself on the table, forgets about her bad arm and stumbles when it won’t take her weight as she stands. 

“Mer?” He steadies her, his hand landing on her waist. Her muscles lock and she stares at him. “What’s wrong?”

She’s not ready for this, totally unprepared, so she gives into her instincts and does what Winchesters do best: she runs, as far as her legs and aching shoulder will let her go, ignoring Finn’s confused shouts behind her.

***

“Girl, we are staging an intervention.” Mer groans and buries her head under her pillow. She had NOT missed this part of having friends. Viv pokes her. “Get up.”

“Go ‘way.” Do they not know to respect a hangover? Or the fact that Mer went on an impromptu 5 mile run last night? They are the worst.

“Nope!” Her covers are unceremoniously ripped away, and while she puts up a vicious fight to keep the pillow, it’s three against one, one of them’s a mom, and again, hangover, so Mer loses handily.

“Good. Take a shower and report downstairs in 15 minutes. We kicked everyone else out and made mimosas,” Lissa orders. That gets Mer’s attention.

“You have Champaign? And orange juice? What time is it?” 

“Priorities,” Chelsea says primly. “And no. We have moonshine, but mimosas sound classier than ‘heavy-on-the-SCREW-drivers’ made with powdered orange drink mix. And it’s late. So move. Chop chop!” They sweep out of the room and Mer stares up at the ceiling until she smells food. 

Best worst friends ever.

\---

They wait until her guard is weighed down by several pancakes (smothered in real maple syrup!) and two and a half glasses of paint stripping, nose-hair-curling moonshine to pounce.

“Soooooooo how’d you fuck things up with Finn last night?” Chelsea asks, perky and upbeat. Mer glares and stuffs her mouth full, but she can only chew so much, and Viv steals her plate, holding it hostage until she talks. She’d actually rather have the “Yes, we’re the Winchesters of Apocalyptic Fame” conversation than this one. She chews until it’s gross not to swallow, and sighs. 

“There is so much wrong with that statement it’s mind boggling, but let’s start with the obvious: there was nothing to fuck up.” She gets three incredulous, derisive snorts in tandem. “There’s not!”

“Oh, honey,” Lissa says condescendingly. 

“Seriously? This is the first I’ve seen any of you in years!” Mer says, and regrets the giant gulp of ‘shine she takes. None of them look like they believe her. “Do you know how much I’ve been through, how much I’ve changed? How much _Finn_ has changed?”

“No to one and two, which we will be addressing later. And we are in a much better position than you to know how much Finn’s changed. But since you’ve both just picked up exactly where High School left off I doubt it matters much. So. What did you do?” Chelsea says.

“Finn fucked, like, half the girls in our school, and probably would have gone through the other half if the Apocalypse hadn’t gotten in the way,” Mer says somewhat meanly. She gets a round of disappointed looks, so Mer joins in and looks longingly at her plate of pancakes. A hostage of pancakes, if you will.

“Are you slut shaming the love of your life?” Viv asks archly, raising the plate higher. That’s the tone she usually pulled out right before tearing football players a new one.

“If we are, don’t forget Robbie and that thing with Chance,” Lissa adds helpfully. “Let’s make sure we shame him for everything.” 

“No, I’m not—what do you mean love of my—wait, _Chance?_ That dickface douche canoe who spread rumors about that freshman cheerleader who wouldn’t sleep with him? When was this?” Viv makes a face, Liss shrugs, and Chelsea pours everyone more booze. 

“We do try to forget about that particular escapade,” Chelsea admits. “It wasn’t one of Finn’s finer moments.”

“Finer—right. Okay, well. Ignoring Finn’s heteroflexibility for like, five minutes, my point is we were never like that, he never felt that way about me, and was it really only the two dudes, because if half your experience is _Chance_ then you owe it to yourself to—”

“Mary,” Viv says flatly. Mer shuts her mouth with a snap.

“It was high school.” Liss says. “And then it was the Apocalypse. Finn was confused, you were, you know, you, and the guys were all after you were gone. I think.”

“Confused,” Mer repeats, flat and not buying what she’s selling. “And what does ‘you were you’ mean? Did you just insult me?”

“And male,” Chelsea adds. “I can’t imagine being a high school boy, so let’s not discount male idiocy in this equation.”

“Being a guy _and_ a teenager is a horrifying thought,” Viv says, shuddering.

“Y’all’re not building a compelling case here,” Mer says and add more mixer to her glass of mostly paint thinner. Her Yelp review of this brunch would read: 2 Stars, Conversation mediocre, booze lethal, and the pancakes are magical until they steal them from you.

“Like any of us actually knew what we wanted in high school,” Lissa says, and that’s definitely a pointed statement about her soap-opera love affair with Jer.

“I knew what you wanted,” Mer says smugly.

“And yet you still kissed my future husband and baby daddy.”

“Once, when we were in elementary school, and it was _traumatizing_!” Mer protests.

“I’d like to circle back and get to the real point, which we’ve all been ignoring,” Viv interrupts. “You said _he_ didn’t feel that way about _you_ , but nothing about how _you_ felt about _him_.” Mer tries to set Viv’s hair on fire with the power of her mind, but she can’t do that anymore. Viv smirks at her, sips at her moonshine mimosa, pinky sticking out like she’s at tea with the Queen of fucking England, and helps herself to a piece of Mer’s pancake. (Mer wonders how the English monarchy fared in this little dust up. She’ll Google it when the internet comes back up.)

“That’s so not the real point!” Liss says. “We’ve all known Mer’s been in love with Finn since forever.”

Is the world shrinking? Because it feels like it is. Everything seems far away, and getting farther, like at the end of a long tunnel. Mer tries to focus, but it’s hard, and breathing isn’t really working for her right now, and maybe that last glass wasn’t the best idea. 

“Mer?” Chelsea sounds like she’s coming from far away. “Oh shit. Mary?!” 

“True love is so dramatic,” Viv sighs, and digs in to Mer’s pancakes. _She’s_ not the one having an existential crisis about something that’s been obnoxiously obvious since forever.

***

Mer refuses to talk about it. If they try, she leaves the conversation, just straight up walks away, then avoids that person for the next three days. She’s not sure why she picked three—that just might be the terminal point of avoiding someone in a tiny house filled with way too many people. 

Finn’s the only one who doesn’t push her. He does something far scarier: he waits.


	10. Sam & Dean

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: This one deals with suicidal thoughts/impulses, and the ramifications of drug addiction and abuse. It doesn't go too in depth, but please be aware and take care of yourselves. <3

Dean has stooped to pulling pranks trying to get a rise out of Sam.

Short-sheeting the bed. Switching out his shampoo. Stealing all of Sam’s underwear and replacing it with some novelty panties Dean found in a partially looted sex shop. Dye in his conditioner. Leaving his towel on the floor, then on Sam’s bed, then _underneath his covers._ He’s really scraping the bottom of the barrel here, so he enlists the kids’ help, enacting some of their more devious plans. While it helps Dean bond with them (and finally earns him Marci’s grudging acceptance), Sam at most looks indulgent, and at worst…empty. Detached.

It goes beyond that, though. Sam, who’s been known to wax poetic about any random geeky subject under the sun, the guardian of PC-ness, whose passions run deep and dorky, says maybe ten words a day now. He usually just hums in response, with a stupid smile hidden by his scraggly caveman beard, or gazes contemplatively into the distance as the talk swirls around him.

Sometimes he sits in the courtyard, basking in the sun, watching the world pass him by. Except Sam hates to think that anything is passing him by, has to dig into it, around it, through it, and understand it completely. That’s a pretty fundamental personality shift from a man who started an independent colony of kids in the middle of three feuding gangs less than a year ago.

And the thing is, while Dean hasn’t always been the most studious person on Earth, he’s got at least two PhD’s in Sam. Sam, who looks fine in the mornings, gets surly around lunchtime, finds his zen again in the afternoon, and disappears right after dinner every night. He naps whenever he can. The net of this is Sam spends a lot of time by himself in his rooms, and if there’s one thing Dean knows about Sam, it’s that the more time he spends by himself, the worse it is for the world. 

Everything about this makes Dean’s Spidey sense tingle.

Checking in with the kids is unhelpful. They accept him, but they don’t really want to talk, and Sam’s day-to-day is spent mostly out of their view. Of the few that interact with him, only a handful say that Sam maybe started acting weird a while ago, but they mostly chalk it up to Sam being An Adult. Dean thought he’d have an ally in Lara, the only other actual grown up in the compound, but she talks about how Sam’s finding Peace and Healing here, their oasis amongst the chaos and nope. That’s utter bullshit, Sam’s not going to be at peace with what happened for the rest of his life, and probably a good chunk of eternity to boot, and healing… Well. 

Dean does the only logical thing and breaks into Sam’s rooms to conduct the kind of prison-style shake down they learned from John.

Which is how Sam comes home to Dean sitting on his mildewed, sagging couch, the contents of three different pouches meticulously arranged on the coffee table in front of him. He takes in Dean and the scene he’s set, then smiles, a smirky little thing like Dean’s done some adorable trick. 

“Don’t look fucking smug,” Dean growls, voice hard. “I’m so angry at you I might just stab you in the face with one of these needles.”

“Dean,” Sam sighs, like Dean’s being overly melodramatic.

“Morphine, Sam? Really? Everything we’ve been through, and you’re a freaking _morphine addict?_ What in the shitting hell.”

“After everything we’ve been through, I’m not sure why you’re surprised,” Sam responds. Is that better or worse than him trying to deny it?

“Oh cut the bullshit. Fuck. I thought the hard part was over. We survived everything the Apocalypse threw at us, and you go and get yourself addicted to something as dumbfuck stupid as morphine. Jesus _fucking_ Christ, Sammy.” He gives Sam the hairy eyeball, and just to be sure—“Christo.” Sam rolls his eyes at that. Well, it was worth checking.

“I’m not addicted,” Sam says.

“Pull the other one,” Dean snaps. Sam throws his hands up in frustration. Dean gets up, taking everything but one pre-filled needle with him. Sam can’t take his eyes off of it. Not addicted Dean’s rather fine ass.

“Not making me go cold turkey?” Sam asks, his voice strained.

“What? Hell no. You’ll die of withdrawal, and I’ll have to start a new Apocalypse to get you back.”

“What, so you can kill me yourself?” Sam asks, and for fuck’s sake, has _no one_ been paying attention? It’s not like Dean’s ever been subtle about the length he will go for his family. For Sam.

“No, you gigantic dickface. So I can spend the rest of our natural lives calling you a goddamn fucking moose-sized moron!” Sam looks poleaxed, like Dean’s unconditional love is some kind of revelation instead of the singular unbreakable rule of the universe. “You’re stepping down gradually until you can kick it completely. I didn’t come here to watch you die, Sammy, even if I’m almost mad enough to let you kill yourself.”

Dean slams the door on his way out and Sam spends a minute staring at the syringe before picking it up with hands that have just started to shake.

~

_Sam found the clinic in what he’d thought was simply high-end apartment housing. There was no indication from the outside there was a state of the art surgical suite and recovery room inside, well stocked with every kind of antibiotic, painkiller, and medication under the sun. And the specter of a waif-like blond girl with “snitch” carved into her forehead. She stood silently in front of a door Sam opted not to open, because he was pretty sure this was some kind of hidden mob clinic and there were some secrets it should be allowed to keep._

_Sam started triaging, loading up his pack with medical supplies, when he came across the Vicodin and paused._

_He’d sliced his calf open pretty good moving glass for the greenhouses a couple days ago, and then walked almost clear across the city today; foraging was getting scarce, forcing him to go farther and farther afield…a farther into gang-held territory. His leg ached, to the point where Sam was sweating from more than just exertion; a painkiller would be a welcome aid getting back to the settlement. Maybe not two Vicodin’s worth, but they made the world go soft around the edges, and he quickly found he couldn’t see the girl or the others who’d started to join her anymore._

_He’d justified everything to himself as he casually worked his way through the stash and up to the morphine. Not a lot, he wasn’t an addict. Not really. He used just enough to make it through the day without seeing anything...untoward._

_Honestly, he knew Dean would figure it out sooner rather than later. It was kind of surprising it took him this long. Long enough that Sam didn’t care that yes, he was physically addicted, and acknowledge that no, he wasn’t going to stop. Not seeing the specters was a small price to pay for the hazy disconnect his life had become._

_Except…_

_Except._

_Why hadn’t he moved his stash?_

***

Dean is a motherfucker. He’s a gaping, unapologetic, rank asshole who deserves to have his guts ripped out and put on display. He’s more loathsome than the creatures wallowing in the deepest pit of Hell. Dean is _the worst._

Sam tucks himself into a corner and glares at Dean’s stupid fucking face. He knows exactly where to dig in his nails to _claw it off_ and—

“Sam?” Sam’s eyes snap up to Dean’s. They’re in the middle of a town hall meeting, though Sam couldn’t tell you what’s been said so far, and everyone seems to be giving him a wide berth. Dustin, a little shit who came from Canada back when they cared about that, crosses his arms and frowns at Sam like he’s disappointed. Sam bares his teeth at Dustin in a twisted parody of a smile. Kid’s got nothing on John Winchester when it comes to disappointment. Sam’s look morphs into a smirk when the kid blanches and shrinks back, alarmed. 

“Sammy!” 

“Don’t fucking call me that,” Sam hisses, full of venom. The brothers glare at one another. Someone starts crying, and several of the kids slip out of the room. They’ve been doing that a lot lately, clearing out whenever Sam shows up. Ungrateful bastards. Except for Marci, who stands her ground and stares at him with challenging, knowing eyes. Sam checks and sure enough, she’s doing it again, glaring at Sam as if she can set him on fire. What the fuck does a fifteen year old know about shit, anyway?

“Alright, that’s it, we’re done here. Time to go.” Dean grabs Sam by the arm and hauls him up. Sam can feel the bruises forming, but allows himself to be manhandled out of the room because he doesn’t want to be here anyway. Fuck Dean, fuck Marci, fuck Dustin, fuck all the freeloading asshole _children_ that can’t take care of themselves—

Dean sucker punches him. Sam stumbles and catches himself on one hand and _rage,_ the kind he hasn’t felt since he was _not himself_ surges through him and he’s up and on Dean before he can even think about it, fists flying, the taste of copper on his tongue. Their fight is brutal and primal, in a way that not even Hunting brought out in them. Only Dean gets this far under his skin. This deep inside of Sam.

When they’re finally done, their knuckles are bleeding and Sam’s pretty sure he’s cracked a couple of ribs. His lip’s split and his left eye has already swollen shut. Dean’s going to have two black eyes when the blood settles, a cut on his cheek and nail marks on his throat. The rage is still there, like an ocean just underneath Sam’s thoughts, but it feels...manageable. Not quite so overwhelming. Not quite like drowning. Just, uh, drowning adjacent.

Dean’s fingers drift lightly over Sam’s face, a touch so startlingly different than anything he’s felt recently Sam’s momentarily confused by it. Dean’s hand spans the breadth of his face, wipes under his eye. Is he...crying?

Sam sucks in a shuddering breath and it punches out in a harsh sob. He can’t seem to catch onto anything, a scrap of cloth caught in a hurricane. He curls on his side, into Dean, who just wraps around him and holds on, lets Sam hide away from the world like when he was little and everything seemed so big. And despite everything, he knows Dean will hold on for as long as it takes. 

***

They lock themselves in Sam’s rooms for a week. The come down is ugly, physically and emotionally.

Dean can’t escape the flood of Sam’s emotions, wild and unchecked. He grits his teeth and rides it out. Feels how true it is when Sam says he hates him. Knows the depth of Sam’s despair when he begs Dean to just let him shake apart and float away. 

Sam pulls the blanket over his head and tells Dean about the shades, the remnants that people and some places carry with them that only he can see. There are two Mers in the room as he talks. Dean’s is eight years old. Sam’s has a gaping wound in her chest.

At one point, Whit sits between them and Sam can’t stop the tears that fall. She was his first victim.

Dean wipes Sam’s brow, changes his clothes and his sheets when he sweats through them or worse, and tells Sam about the life he lived in a small no-stoplight town in the mountains while Sam thought Dean was dead and tried to burn the world to ash. It was beautiful—someone’s version of idyllic, a place the Apocalypse hadn’t touched. And Dean had been miserable, lonely and depressed, aching for something he knew in his bones he needed but couldn’t ever put into words.

Sam begs Dean to let him go, let it end; Dean tells him how he thought about ending it everyday. How he could trip and fall in the path of Farmer Goddard’s wagon, or take a tumble down the Small Falls, or accidentally close the flu of his little potbellied stove and drift quietly to sleep.

He still has the memories of a life he never actually lived in the back of his head. Sometimes he dreams about it and wakes up sweating, terrified it’s real. That’s he’s still that person, and this is the lie. 

They share the bed for the first time that night. Dean wakes up with Sam’s too-fast heartbeat thumping beneath his palm and knows where he is. Who he is.

Sam gasps awake, his dreams and nightmares too real, and buries his face in the crook of Dean’s neck, and reminds himself he’s not alone. Never alone.

Sam’s fever eventually breaks and they both breathe easier


	11. Mer

Home settles into a routine that’s nice, and as lazy as surviving anywhere gets these days. But there’s something missing, and this routine isn’t as fulfilling as Warm Springs. There, Mer had found a niche, felt helpful and like she was doing something important. Here runs like a well-oiled machine and her presence feels…superfluous.

There are more families living in her old house than it was ever supposed to hold, but they’ve eeked out some kind of harmony and it works. They move around each other, knowing instinctively where to accommodate and where to stand their ground; people have claimed their spaces, settled into their roles, and they have a tendency to stare at Mer with confusion as she tries to navigate it all.

There’s no give here. 

She doesn’t fit. 

Her friends didn’t see it, except for maybe Viv, and when she tries to talk to them they seem to think the answer to try and invite Mer to do chores, help with the babysitting, take part in the cooking. But four months in and they’re still invitations; she’s not integrated. Integral. She’s a visiting aunt who’s doing her best to be helpful and unobtrusive.

This may have been home, might always have that title in her mind, but her future lies elsewhere. Which means she needs to have a very specific conversation with a very specific someone because she promised herself she was going to do this and, just like at Warm Springs, she knows it’s Time. 

*

The house smells like bread and home cooking, dinner simmering on the stove. Mer climbs out onto the second story eves and sort of…sends her Intentions out into the universe. It doesn’t take long.

She hears Finn coming well before he climbs through the window to sit beside her, feet dangling over the edge of the roof. He puts a small pitcher of lemonade between them as a peace offering and settles in. 

“Hey.” 

Mer folds her knees up and sets her chin on them, gaze fixed firmly on the setting sun. Panic tries to creep in around the edges of her vision but she pushes it away. She is calm. Cool. Collected. Other c-words. Not that one. Okay, sometimes that one. 

She forces herself to reach out for the pitcher, her fingers intentionally brushing against Finn’s arm; it feels like electrified ants race through her

“Thanks,” she says quietly, taking a blissful sip straight out of the container. More tart than sweet, just the way she likes it. 

“Viv calls it Support-Aide.” 

“Lies. There’s no booze in this.” Finn laughs, an easy sound, and takes the pitcher back.

“You don’t have cooties, right?” he jokes, eyeing her suspiciously. 

“Nope, got my shot.” She waits until he’s just taken a sip to add, “Managed to avoid the herpes too.” Finn chokes on the lemonade and swears when it goes up his nose.

“Dork,” he coughs, wiping away his tears.

“Nerd,” she volleys back, the word soft and affectionate.

They pass the pitcher back and forth while the sun turns the sky a riot of beautiful colors. When it’s mostly indigo, stars twinkling points in the sky, Mer sighs and lies back so she can see them, the universe stretched out above her.

“Are you leaving?” Finn eventually asks, a small tremble in his voice.

“Yeah,” Mer says on a sigh. “But not forever. Maybe not even for that long. I’m not sure.”

“But you’ll never stay. Will you?”

“No,” Mer says after a beat. “I don’t think I can.”

Finn doesn’t react, just stares at the fields of corn. His aura is superficially even and uniform, like he’s carefully keeping ahold of himself, and as tempting as it is to look deeper she doesn’t. She owes Finn his privacy. 

“I’m not running,” she tells him. “It’s been a really effective coping mechanism for most of my life, but. Brave new world, right? Discussing feelings and shit.”

He looks over at her then, face smooth and blank as his aura. “As long as you don’t faint on me while ‘discussing feelings and shit’. We’re on a roof.”

“I didn’t faint,” Mer says. “I stood up too fast and gracefully…glided…downward.”

“Right. I’m sure that’s not the actual definition of fainting, and everyone was just exaggerating,” Finn says dryly.

Silence falls between them, heavy with the things they need to say. Probably would have stretch on forever, but for Finn. Gloriously brave and honest Finn.

“Living through the Apocalypse should make this easier,” he sighs, rubbing a hand through his hair.

“I’d honestly rather walk into a house full of demons than do this,” Mer admits. And she still can’t bring herself to actually say what she needs to, though to be fair, this is a secret she’s never had to tell anyone before. The people who needed to know knew, and those that didn’t, well. That wasn’t really her area. “I did that once. It turned out okay. Ish.”

“You life is a horror movie,” Finn mutters, and he’s not wrong.

Silence stretches between them, pregnant with things not yet said.

“I—“

“Did—“ 

“Please go first,” Mer says, relieved.

“Did people tease you in high school? About us?” Finn asks, a deep furrow in the middle of his brow. And interesting opening volley. 

“Not really? I mean, people always said things, but it was mostly adults that seemed to be serious. Our classmates just seemed kind of…confused.”

“I got it bad. None of the guys seemed to understand how we could be friends. Or only friends. They said a lot of really terrible things. And it probably didn’t help that I had a big ole crush on you.” His face reddens when he says it. “I don’t think that’s news to you though.”

“I…” This shouldn’t be so hard. She trusts Finn. And if she ever wants whatever this could be, she needs him to know. To understand. “Did. Kind of?”

Finn shoots her an incredulous look and Mer winces.

“Yeah, I know. It’s just…you know how I, uh. Read people? “ she gestures to her head and Finn rolls his eyes at her.

“Yes, we all know about your freaky mind powers we all know about but never mention.” He bumps their shoulders together and grins at her sideways, utterly endearing. “Brave new world?”

“Yeah, well. I’ve never been able to read myself. Not even now. And reading other people is…subjective. I don’t always know everything, and I can, uh…bring my own bias into things. Sometimes.” She picks non existent lint off of her pants while Finn watches the painful train wreck that is Mary Winchester talking about her feelings. 

“You’re being very good and talking around your point,” he says, without bite or rancor.

“I knew you liked me, but I, uh, didn’t _know_ if you _liked_ me. Or if _I_ liked you, and you didn’t really like me like that, but I wanted you to, or maybe I like you but not as much as you liked me, or maybe more than you, or… I didn’t know-know. I just suspected and…” she trails off with a shrug.

Finn squints are her for a minute that stretches into two and Mer’s just about done with this whole talking bullshit because it _clearly_ doesn’t work when she has to grab Finn to keep him from rolling off the roof in deep, spontaneous belly laughter.

“Okay, fucking rude, Finnigan,” she mutters, frowning down at her lunatic of a best friend. “Stop laughing at me.”

“N-no, no, it’s—“ he writhes on the ground, gasping for air around his laughter. “W-we never hooked up b-because you’re a regular, scared human who c-c-can’t deal with emotions or rejection!” Finn gasps between giggles. And fine, Finn can laugh all he wants, Mer is through with this. Except she barely makes the most cursory attempt to leave, letting Finn easily keep her seated. “No, no, no, hear me out. Because, like, in literally every other instance you’ve got a huge step up on us mere mortals. You see whatever it is you see. But in this specific situation you’re just as lost and confused as the rest of us. And that’s…”

Finn’s wide grin changes to something soft and special, and Mer is honestly shocked when he leans up and kisses her, his lips soft and inviting, his hands gently framing her face. He pulls back and that silly smile is still on his face and Jesus, no one told her love _always hurt_ like this. Where did the goddamned sunshine and rainbows come in and the gut punch feeling leave?

“You’re the only person I’ve ever wanted to call for a 2 am Wendy’s run. And I’ve wanted to make a lot of 2 am Wendy’s runs these past few years,” he tells her. It’s the dumbest, most Finn thing to say and it makes her eyes get misty because she knows the feeling. The exact feeling he’s talking about.

Finn laughs again and lays down, pulling her down beside him so they’re both looking up at the same stars in the same sky. His hand brushes against hers and their fingers tangle together. 

“Ugh, now I want a burger,” Finn groans. “A big, juicy burger with cheese on top, wrapped in bacon.”

“Bacon,” Mer says, reverent. The share a moment of silence for bacon, and all the things of Before. Though, maybe some things from Before are worth moving on from. Not bacon though.

They hear a car approaching, incredibly noisy now that technology use and power is rationed. Liss comes running out of the house, and Jer gets out of the car so they can suck face.

“The car is running!” Finn yells at them. “Stop wasting gas!” Jer casually flips him off, but they pull away from one another long enough to get in and speed off to whatever romantic rendezvous they have planned for the night. 

“They’re insatiable,” Mer mutters, but she’s happy for them. It’s nice to see them still so in love, though that love has changed into something more mature and settled since the raging, all-encompassing inferno that was high school.

“You should have been here when they were working out their accidental baby feelings.” Mer huffs, imaging Jer and Liss’s drama when there were actual stakes involved. She’d probably have found a reason to move in with Missouri or Bobby until it passed. Finn makes a contemplative sound. “It would be nice to have a soul mate.”

“No it wouldn’t,” Mer says immediately, tension zinging through her.

Finn posts up on one arm and looks down on her, a frown on his face.

“What? Why would you say that?”

Mer sits up with a sigh so they’re facing each other.

“I’ve met 15 people in my whole life who have soul mates.”

“That’s sad,” Finn says, thinking of the odd person out in that equation.

“No, ‘soul mate’ isn’t figurative, Finn. It’s pretty fucking literal, actually.” He still looks confused and Mer steels herself for the conversation ahead. “Imagine this: you are born into this world incomplete. Fragmented. Missing something essential, but having no idea what that is…and realizing that no one else seems to be missing it. It’s like…someone cut you with a knife and you can’t heal because the other side of your skin is just not there, and there’s nothing to cover or heal over the wound so you’re constantly bleeding out.

“And you go through life looking for a cure. Whatever it is everyone else seems to have. And maybe, if you’re lucky, you find someone. The one person out of billions who eases the ache because you are both suffering the same way, one-half of the same whole. You’ve found it, but you’ll never be like everyone else because you are two where there should be one and you can’t fix that. You can only try to get as close as possible.”

“Is this a sex thing?” Finn asks, a joke that disguises the seriousness of his question.

“Sometimes,” Mer says. “I try not to look too hard. Or speculate.”

“Why?” And thus do they reach the point of no return. Mer lets her eyes slide shut, takes comfort in the darkness behind her lids.

“Of the 15 soul mates I’ve met, three hadn’t found their partner. Of the pairs, two randomly found each other, one pair were next-door neighbors, one pair were second cousins, one was a mother and a daughter.” Mer takes a breath and soldiers on, “And the pair you’ve met are brothers.”

Finn frowns in confusion. She can see the thought germinate, bloom, get rejected out of hand, then circle back and stick when Finn’s expressive eyes go round and wide. A tense, loaded silence stretches between them. He shifts away so they’re no longer touching.

“You’ve always referred to your parents soul mates,” he says slowly, voice shaking. “Dean. And Sam.”

“Yep.”

“Even when we were…pretty young.”

“Yep.” 

“Well. Fuck,” Finn says, sagging against her. 

“Yeah,” Mer says, suddenly tired down to her bones.

She lays there, eyes closed, cold with the space between them.

“What am I supposed to do with that?” Finn finally asks, sounding lost.

“I have no idea,” Mer says, “I’ve never trusted anyone with this.”

A shift and rustle, and Mer can sense Finn leaning over her. She lets her eyes slide open, aiming for a blank, indifferent expression, but her heart pounds in her chest and she knows Finn can see it beating in her veins if he looks.

It’s fully night, but the moon is bright and there’s plenty of light to see the way he’s looking at her, serious and intent.

“Can you show me?”

“What?”

“Can you show me? The difference? The soul mates?”

Mer hums and thinks about it. “I don’t know. But I can try?”

They face each other, cross-legged, and join hands. Mer closes her eyes and centers herself, pulls up a mental image of her parents, the good times she’d think about when she was feeling weak and vulnerable.

There was a time once when Atta had surprised Dad with tickets to see a band called Kansas. 

_“Not a date,” her Dad had insisted, but he was sparkly-pink with happiness and love, little firework bursts blooming within him._

_“We don’t date,” her Atta had said, voice grave and serious, but he was a bubbling green-blue joke, and when they drifted close together their colors were beautiful jewel tones, rich and deep, melding together like a sunset, layered and completely complementary, turning the same until the outlines blurred and they looked alike. Whole together, when you hadn’t quite realized they weren’t complete when apart._

_Then there’s Whit and Damien for comparison, two people tailored made to smooth out the sharp places and vice versa, wholly in love and wholly whole at all times. They’re _gorgeous,_ but when Mer puts them beside Dean and Sam the difference is astounding. Whit and Damien are each a masterpiece wrought by the same hand, standing side-by-side, separate but together. Sam and Dean are clearly unfinished when apart, the core of themselves restless and bubbling, only settling in a grudging semblance of contentment when they’re close, the edges of one another seeping together, seeking alignment and slotting into place. No matter how out of step, one can see them trying to orient to one another._

_On the heels of that comes Mer’s memory of the first time she’d seen her parents together—not when Atta had first come to live with them and was sleeping on the couch, but the first time they were _together,_ in sync, striding in tandem, hearts beating in time, no way to tell where one of the stopped and the other began, auras merged, one breathing in while the other exhaled and—_

Finn jerks away, gasping. Mer lets the memories slip away. 

“They,” Finn says, and there are tears on his face. “They’re…”

She’d forgotten, over the years, how brilliant her parents were. How much love they had for each other. How bright they burned for one another, and how smothered they were alone. How hard it must have been for her father to keep himself away from her Atta. What that choice, made day-to-day, second-to-second, must have cost him.

She forgot a lot of things, wrapped up in her own drama and hurt.

“Ecstasy and agony entwined,” Mer says expansively. Finn shoots her a dumb, incredulous look and she laughs. “Look, it sounds better than ‘they are literally incomplete people until they die.’ Wow. I don’t even know what happens to soulmates when they die. Do you think they merge together, or are they like an eternal yin-yang? This conversation is going to give me nightmares.”

“Fuck,” Finn hisses out, unconsciously rubbing at his chest. “That’s…so fucked.” 

“Yeah,” Mer says, casting out for the first time in over a year, asking a question and knowing immediately the answer. East and a little North. “So while we're here, what are your feelings on kids?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew. Sorry this took so long--my computer died, and I've had a clunky loaner until I could finally get myself a new one, and I got punched in the face by depression for a minute there...but we're almost to The End! Which. Wow.


	12. Sam & Mer

Sam’s been clean for three weeks and it sucks. His joints ache all the time and he gets tired easily because being present is _exhausting,_ which means he snaps at the kids and then he feels worse. He only craves drugs inasmuch as it would be easier to not be in pain, and to not see the shades; it’s not the all-consuming desire for the next hit or drink he’s heard some addicts talk about. Well, not once his body started producing its own pain-regulating chemicals again. Maybe he’s so defective and can’t even get addiction right.

Today Dean coaxes him downstairs for a security meeting Sam can barely pay attention to. He can only really stomach Dean these days; most of their shades are shared, so there aren’t many unpleasant surprises waiting to ambush him. Kid’s brains are elastic, but sometimes they abruptly snap back on themselves and he finds himself face-to-face with dead parents or siblings, their bodies and faces often disturbingly blank, or excessively mangled, as dictated by a child’s memory

They’re working on it together though, him and Dean, and they’re on Action Step 4 of How To Turn Sam Into A Real Boy: sit through an entire Town Hall. No participation or retention required. He just has to sit there. For an hour. With people. 

Sam takes it in 10-second intervals. He can survive anything for 10 seconds, right?

And finally, finally, it’s over, people breaking into smaller groups and chatting away. Marci marches towards him and Sam’s not up for that, no ma’am, so he uses his extensive training to make a quick escape and high tails it up to the roof, where he’s taken to hiding when people get to be too much. It’s technically public space, but no one comes up here any more, especially when it’s dark. Sam leans over the railing and gazes down at the bonfires flickering in the courtyard. They always throw a little celebratory party post-Town Halls, and he can just barely hear faint strains of music floating up to him.

Dean will hang out for a couple of hours or so to glad hand the residents (because he hasn’t realized he’s the mayor of their little settlement yet) before joining Sam on the roof. They’ll sit too close, maybe touch a little too intimately, and Dean will push a little farther than he did yesterday before they head to the bed they never stopped sharing. 

A light breeze ruffles his hair, just a hint of ice and frigid cold carried with it, and Sam shivers. Winter will set on fast and they need to be ready. He’s sure Dean has everything under control, but…huh. Sam feels the familiar itch _to know_ start up in the back of his head. 

Hmmm. 

It’s been a while. 

And today of all days for that drive to come back.

He grabs two beers out of the icebox he keeps up here and pops them open, leaves them sweating on the table while he settles back against the railing. Faces his fate head on. Burrows into his exhaustion to keep him level. 

“You look like shit.”

Sam’s breath comes out as a dry, cracked laugh.

“Yeah, well. I’m fresh out of rehab.” He spreads his arms to show how his shirt hangs off his emaciated frame. “I like the hair.” 

Mer automatically reaches up to run her fingers over the short stubble of her undercut. It’s all gone on the sides and left long at the top; she’s plaited the long hair into a series of winding braids that looks very Viking warrior. She wears it well.

“Viv did it.”

“Vivienne? You went home? How...how was it?”

Mer smiles. It’s small, but devoid of any barbs or sharpness that Sam can tell. She snags one of the drinks and sidles up beside him, draping her arms over the railing and looking down at the party.

“Still standing. Full of memories. The house kept a lot of people safe. The wards never failed.” Small mercies. Sam would like to think some part of him wanted to keep their home safe; now that he thinks about it, he never targeted their sleepy little town, mostly left that part of the country alone. But that might be giving himself too much credit. “Almost everyone pulled through. Damien didn’t make it, but after Whit, I don’t think he really wanted to, so. Everyone else is...older. Liss and Jer have an adorable accidental baby.”

“Oh god,” Sam says, aghast. “What did they burn down before they worked _that_ situation out?”

“I’m told Jer’s eyebrows were the only casualties,” Mer replies, dry as dust. But her eyes crinkle at the corner.

Mer watches the kids jump wildly around the fire, playing some complicated and ever-changing version of tag, but her gaze consistently ends up on Dean who’s stretched out in a chair by the fire, nursing a beer and overseeing the shenanigans like an indulgent lord. Sam can’t blame her because he always finds himself orienting towards Dean too. Their family’s North Star.

But for now, Sam studies his…his…does he have the right to call her his daughter? Did he ever? Niece may be technically correct but that will never quite fit what they are to each other. Even when he’s trying to burn the world down around her.

She’s definitely not a kid anymore, he realizes. Like, no shit, but... Even in the brief glimpses he’d had in Firewall there’d been a hint of youth clinging to her. But it’s been, wow, almost two full years since he’s actually seen her and she’s grown up. Settled into her face, the one that’ll see her thru most of the rest of her life, shed the last bits of deference to adult authority. She carries herself like and adult, like she’s here as an equal. Sam feels proud, though he knows he shouldn’t; he lost that right in rather spectacular fashion.

“Why are you here, Mary?”

She pulls herself away to study him and Sam feels seen.

“Hmmmm. Well. I may have told Finn a story,” she says, smirking at him in a way that invites him into the joke. Cryptic psychics, the lot of them. “And I hadn’t realized I’d forgotten the moral of it until I got to the end.”

“Sounds like a hell of a tale,” Sam says.

“You would know,” she says, and a chill skitters down Sam’s spine. “I told Finn. Came clean. About...” She makes a gesture that is both utterly meaningless and Sam knows is meant to encompass him, and Dean, and Mer, and their entire fucked up family.

“That’s. Wow. How, how’d he take it?”

“Better than expected. I kind of buried it under the crushing realization that being soul mates sucks,” Mer says, and Sam laughs, the kind of laugh that starts deep in his belly and bursts out in an embarrassingly loud honking sound. 

“It really, really does,” he says, wiping at the tears in his eyes.

“Here’s the thing,” she says, stepping up to him. She’s just barely shorter than Dean. “I’m tired. And I’m pretty sure you are too.” 

Sam knows exactly what she means. It’s not physical exhaustion, but the kind of complete exhaustion of self that makes morphine sounds like a good idea. Or risk flaying open your brain trying to run away from the tattered remains of your family.

“I’m tired of running, I’m tired of not having a home, I really tired of having to figure things out by myself because non-Apocalyptic life seems to be just an infinite number of ever-increasing choices with no clear directive forward and that’s, there’s too many choices. Like. What am I supposed to _do_ now? I want my family. I deserve my family. I deserve stability, and comfort, and advice, oh my God, I need so much advice. I’ve _earned_ it. I want it. I want to figure out how we can have that. Because what do we do now?”

She looks genuinely bewildered and lost, and while Sam smiles at the picture he also feels choked because he did this. Mer should be at college figuring these things out at frat parties and in classrooms. Instead she’s wondering what to do with her life after she helped stop the world from ending.

“I ran away and adopted a commune of very traumatized kids.” They stare at each other before Sam hastens to add, “I really don’t recommend that. Maybe you should start somewhere smaller. A dog, maybe. Or a boyfriend. Or girlfriend! I...am definitely not in a place to judge any. Of that. Not that I would!”

“I think Finn and I realized we might love each other. Like for real big adult kind of love,” Mer interrupts, ever merciful. And whoa. Whoa. That’s...that’s... “Except I also realized I may have always known that, and probably kind of sublimated my feelings by having a very obvious crush on an angel of the lord. And like…what is my life? Who am I supposed to talk to about these things except the people who got me into this mess in the first place?”

The silence that surrounds them seems to ring. Sam doesn’t really have answers for the big questions Mer’s asking, or even knows where to start unraveling the mess he’s made of their relationship, so he sticks to the next most important thing: “Which one?”

“What?” Mer asks.

“Which angel did you have a crush on?”

“Uh.” Mer blushes and that’s _adorable._ “His name was Cas. Castiel.”

“The stuck up accountant looking one that only had a personality on Thursdays?” Sam asks, incredulous. 

“He had pretty eyes,” Mer mutters, and Sam proves that he’s actually trying to repair their relationship by not pointing out that _angels_ don’t actually have eyes, their _hosts_ do.

He remembers hearing about Dean’s angel, never far from his charge and joined at the hip. The first time he’d heard a lackey joking about the two of them he’d laid waste to Cairo in his rage, coming to bathed in fire, the desert sand like glass and nothing living within a hundred miles. He can still taste the sickly slide of jealousy knifing through him and drops his eyes as he wrestles with everything that swims up to the surface.

He glances up and Mer looks him in the eye. There’s anger there, of course there is, and years worth of hurt and mistrust, but it’s not the only thing he sees when she looks at him now.

“Does Dean know?” He laughs at the way she scrunches her face.

“Oh gods, I hope not. Their relationship was weird. Did y’all, uh. Know about Finn?”

“Mer,” he says, as kindly as possible, “literally everyone knew about you and Finn except you and Finn. And I wasn’t always convinced about Finn.”

“Fuuuuuuu—“ Mer moans, collapsing dramatically against the low wall. It’s a bit performative—they aren’t comfortable enough with each other for it to be completely spontaneous and open. But it’s a start.

“For what it’s worth,” Sam says, tone light, “we were all rooting for you two crazy kids.” He puts a fresh drink by her hand and smiles when she cuddles it close.

“Even Dad?”

“Well. I think your dad was ignoring all the _things_ that go along with budding teenage romance but. Yeah. Even him. And me.” Mer smiles at that, looks back down at the kids below them. The fire’s banked low and people are starting to wander off to their beds. 

“Could I have done to stop you from hating me?” It feels like a slow-motion punch to his solar plexus. The chill of the air suddenly bites at him and he feels hollow. 

“No,” Sam says, his throat tightening. “I’m sorry.” He could say more—so much more—but he can’t get it out.

“So am I.”

“No, that’s—” Mer glares at him, but Sam glares right back. “You’re my kid, and you were not in charge of anything that happened. It was on me. Well, mostly me, a little on Dean, and a lot on the forces of darkness. But you have _nothing_ to apologize for, Mary Winchester. Least of all to me.” Mer’s lips press together and she gets the same stubborn just of her jaw that Dean does when he digs his heels into something particularly self-sacrificing.

“I fucked up too.” Sam wishes that she’d managed to dodge their family’s tendency to shoulder as much blame as possible in any given situation.

“I know you’re going to think this is dismissive,” Sam says, voice even, “but at no point in this entire shit show of an Apocalypse were you ever not a kid. And that means everyone around you fucked up long before any blame comes to rest at your feet.”

“You don’t understand—“ she says, her fingers digging bruises into her arms.

“Mary, I know that our life was hard. It always has been--we should have stopped hunting. We shouldn’t have brought you up in this life in the first place. You’ve had to make terrible choices, all because of decisions Dean and I made for you. You’ve had to do do terrible things. Like what you did to your Dad,” Sam says softly, like that will soften the blow. It doesn’t, Mer flinches away from him and hunches in on herself. “I know what goes into that kind of spell. And I would have done the exact same thing. But Mer. You gotta know what eats at Dean the most about what you did, right?”

The silence that descends upon them is suffocating. Mer stares at him, jaw tights and kindles white around her bottle. This may be the last time she talks to Sam for the rest of their lives, but he’s going to go out trying to salvage her relationship with Dean. Because someone has to talk about the life sacrifice that had to have gone along with Dean’s resurrection, and she’s right: she deserves her family, even if Sam never qualifies for that again. 

“Dean’s not mad about the mind wipe. Well. He is but that’s...he got over that pretty quickly. He just can’t contend with the knowledge that you killed. To save him. He doesn’t know how to fix that for you.”

Mer stares at her hands as she forces them to relax, one finger at a time. Rolls her wrists out, flexes her fingers then makes a fist. Repeats the process until her breathing's even and the sharp burn of rage has passed.

“Y’all really think I slit someone’s throat just to save my father,” Mer says, flat and angry.

“I think you shot them,” Sam says, serious and honest, “unless the spell required the blood. More humane.” 

Mer’s face cycles through a couple of amusing iterations as she processes that, finally settling on a dark, humorless, “Thanks.”

“You didn’t start the End Times and directly orchestrate the death of millions, so I think we can deal with it,” Sam responds with equal darkness.

“Our family is a travesty,” Mer marvels, and Sam doesn’t disagree. “Also, I didn’t kill anyone.”

“So you found someone and convinced them to off themselves, that’s semantics and not exactly better, so let’s not go down that slippery slope. It’s more treacherous than you think.”

“No, I…wait, is that something you would’ve done? Have done?” Mer asks, caught between fascinated and horrified with this new insight into her parents. “Would—would _Dad?_ ”

“What? No! Well.” Sam swallows and won’t look at her. He can’t honestly say there isn’t a line he wouldn’t cross for Dean. Or vice versa. He glances back up at her and there’s something about her expression that makes him feel like shit for stripping away this last tattered remnants of her parent’s infallibility, but also fills him with something like hope because, “…you really didn’t kill anyone? How is that possible? Dean died. I felt it. Life demands balance.”

“He died,” Mer says, still giving Sam the hairy eyeball. “But I clearly have a much better imagination than both of you when it comes to spellwork. Also, I don’t think either of you know me if you think I’d casually murdered someone for my own personal gain.”

“I don’t think it was casual--” 

“I didn’t sacrifice anyone!” He waits her out, just like Dean. Give them some line and they’ll reel themselves in. “Sometimes, under the right set of circumstances--liiiiike when your entire family line is the result of an angelic eugenics program and integral to a bunch of world shaping plots and schemes--sacrificing the possibility of a thing is enough.”

“You… Oh. OH. Mary…” 

“You’ll be happy to know the Winchesters won’t be starting any more Apopcali!” Mer says with false cheer. “This is it. Our final form. I hope you never had your hopes up for grandkids.”

She jerks away from the railing to pace halfway into the garden before she stops, hands shoved deep in her pockets, staring into nothing.

Fuck. Sam fights down the fury that suddenly rises in him, that Mer was forced to make that kind of choice. That sacrifice. He doesn’t even know if Mer wanted kids; she’d just been growing into the age where she might have been thinking about those distant-but-incoming life choices. But he knows how magic works, particularly the magic of sacrifice.

“I”m not sure we could have done much better,” Sam says, a little strangled. Mer looks at him with such wide-eyed vulnerability that Sam suddenly feels claustrophobic, so he rushes to add, “And adoption is a thing. Though I recommend keeping it under twenty. And spacing them out.” She smirks, armor back in place, and Sam can breathe again. 

“You know the worst part?” He’s just taking a long, much-needed sip of his beer when she says, mournfully sullen, “I still get periods.” 

Beer still burns like all hell when it goes up one’s nose, settling like stinging nettles behind the eyes. 

“That, uh. Sucks,” Sam agrees, wiping at the spill down the front of his shirt. His ears feel hot and he can’t seem to look at Mer. 

“Everything we’ve been through,” Mer says, “and it’s periods that get to you.” Sam clears his throat in discomfort and Mer laughs. It starts off as a giggle, but it grows into something deep and broad and holding far more emotions that just laughter, and it’s infectious. Sam finds himself joining in because yes. Periods do make him unaccountably uncomfortable and that’s fucking ridiculous what is wrong with him? It’s like a feedback loop of hysteria neither of them can stop until breathing is hard and their faces are wet.

That’s how Dean finds them, his daughter and his Sammy, sitting on the ground, crying with laughter.

“What. The fuck,” Dean says, mouth hanging open in his astonishment. Sam and Mer freeze like they’ve been caught out after curfew, lungs heaving. Sam feels a hysterical giggle burst out of him and claps a hand over his mouth. He’s shaking. 

“Did you know,” Mer says, posting up on her elbows, “that Uncle Sam was jealous of Castiel?” Dean gapes at them, mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water, and they both dissolve into bright, tinkling laughter again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more to go--thanks for hanging in there, depression is a bitch and it lies like a dog.


End file.
